THIS IS NOT A WOMAN: LITERARY BODIES AND PRIVATE SELVES IN THE
WORKS OF THE CHINESE AVANT-GARDE WOMEN WRITERS
by
BRYNA MEREDITH TUFT
A DISSERTATION
Presented to the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
December 2012
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DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Bryna Meredith Tuft Title: This Is Not a Woman: Literary Bodies and Private Selves in the Works of the Chinese Avant-Garde Women Writers This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures by: Dr. Tze-lan Sang Chair Dr. Maram Epstein Member Dr. Alison Groppe Member Dr. Bryna Goodman Outside Member and Kimberly Andrews Espy Vice President for Research & Innovation/Dean of the
Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded December 2012
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© 2012 Bryna Meredith Tuft
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DISSERTATION ABSTRACT
Bryna Meredith Tuft Doctor of Philosophy Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures December 2012 Title: This Is Not a Woman: Literary Bodies and Private Selves in the Works of the Chinese Avant-Garde Women Writers
During the period of economic expansion and openness to personal expression
and individuality following Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, the Chinese avant-garde women
writers engaged in a project of resistance to the traditionally appropriated use of the
female body, image, and voice. This resistance can be seen in the ways they consciously
construct a private space in their fiction. In this dissertation, I argue that this space is
created by presenting alternative forms of female sexuality, in contrast to the
heterosexual wife and mother, and by adding details of their own personal histories in
their writing. Key to this argument is the Chinese concept of si (privacy) and how the
female avant-garde writers turn its traditionally negative associations into a positive tool
for writing the self. While male appropriations of images of the female body for political
or state-authored purposes are not new to the contemporary period or even the twentieth
century, the female avant-garde writers are particularly conscious of the ways in which
their bodies are not their own. Moreover, contemporary criticism that labels the works of
the female avant-garde writers as self-exposing, titillating, and trite overlooks the
difference between authorial intent and commercial or political appropriation, which has
led to a profound misunderstanding of these works. In addition, it has also led to a
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conflation of the female avant-garde writers’ works with those of the later body writers.
Therefore the purpose of this dissertation is to provide a closer look at the concept of si-
privacy and how it intersects with various forms of self-writing, and how it is used as a
narrative strategy by three contemporary female authors, Xu Kun, Lin Bai, and Hai Nan.
Specifically, I consider the similarities and differences in the ways that these authors
create and orient themselves in both their memoirs and their self-referential fiction.
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CURRICULUM VITAE
NAME OF AUTHOR: Bryna Meredith Tuft GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene University of Colorado, Boulder DEGREES AWARDED:
Doctor of Philosophy, Modern Chinese Literature, 2012, University of Oregon Master of Arts, Modern Chinese Literature, 2005, University of Colorado at Boulder Bachelor of Arts, Chinese, U.S. History, Asian Studies, 2001, University of Colorado at Boulder AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature Women’s and Gender Studies PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Lead Instructor, University of Oregon, “A Chinese Cultural Odyssey,” Summer
2007,2008, 2009, 2010
Graduate Teaching Fellow, University of Oregon, Chinese language and literature, 2006-2011
GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Foreign Language and Area Studies Summer Language Fellowship, 2011
Foreign Language and Area Studies Dissertation Research Fellowship, 2009-2010 Center for the Study of Women in Society Dissertation Research Grant, 2009-
2010 Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures Graduate School Award,
University of Oregon, 2009 East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department Fellowship, University of
Colorado at Boulder, 2003-2004 and 2004-2005
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PUBLICATIONS: Translator, "Why the Salesman Went Missing" (推销员为什么失踪), by Wang
Shou 王手. In, Best Chinese Short Stories 2009-2010 published by MerwinAsia (Portland, Me) (forthcoming).
Translator, “The Time of Cat’s Passion” (猫的激情时代), by Lin Bai 林白. In
Renditions, published by The Research Center for Translation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, (planned, Spring 2013).
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ACKNOWLDGEMENTS
I thank Professor Tze-lan Sang and Professor Maram Epstein for their continuing
support and encouragement. I also thank the Center for the Study of Women in Society
at the University of Oregon for a research dissertation research grant, as well as the
Center for Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Oregon for a Foreign Language
and Area Studies Grant, both of which provided the opportunity to continue to research
and work on this project. I additionally thank Jiang Hongyan and Lin Danya for allowing
me to take part in the Ninth and Tenth International Symposiums on Chinese Women’s
Literature held in China, and the opportunity to interact with other scholars and learn
additional perspectives on this topic. Finally, I thank Leah Foy and the faculty and staff
of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, as well as the Women’s and
Gender Studies Department and the University of Oregon for the opportunity to pursue
this degree and their help in bringing it to fruition.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 1
Terminology.................................................................................................................. 27
Structure........................................................................................................................ 28
Notes ............................................................................................................................. 32
II. WRITING THE PRIVATE BODY........................................................................... 35
“Private Writing” and Autobiography .......................................................................... 36
“Private Writing” and “Individualized Writing” .......................................................... 47
Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 52
Notes ............................................................................................................................. 59
III. THE PUBLIC-ATION OF THE PRIVATE BODY................................................ 62
Li Xiaojiang and Dai Jinhua’s “Corporeal” Feminisms ............................................... 69
The Avant-Garde Writers: Reclaiming the Self and Mediating Consumption............. 74
Conclusion: The Chi Li Phenomenon and the Trap of Publication .............................. 85
Notes ............................................................................................................................. 88
IV. SELF-ISH WRITING: MEDIATING HISTORY, THEORY, AND THE FEMALE BODY IN THE WORKS OF XU KUN.................................................. 92
Mediating Patriarchal Culture and Women’s Writing: Xu Kun’s Notes on My Life.... 93
Self-Writing and the Theoretical Body: The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring............... 100
Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 118
Notes ........................................................................................................................... 119
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Chapter Page
V. SELF-ISH WOMEN: INDIVIDUALIZED WRITING AND PRIVACY IN THE WORKS OF LIN BAI .................................................................................................... 122
The Gold of Previous Incarnations: Notes from My Life ........................................... 123
One Person’s War....................................................................................................... 131
Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 153
Notes ........................................................................................................................... 155
VI. SELF-ISH PASSION: HAI NAN’S A DISSOLUTE LIFE: NOTES FROM MY LIFE AND MY LOVERS ................................................................................................ 160
A Dissolute Life: Notes from My Life ......................................................................... 161
My Lovers.................................................................................................................... 170
Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 178
Notes ........................................................................................................................... 179
VII. CONCLUSION: PUBLIC EXPOSURE: THE BODY WRITERS AND WOMEN’S “SELF-WRITING”..................................................................................... 181
Mian Mian’s Candy and the New Liumang ................................................................ 185
Wei Hui’s Shanghai Baby and Linglei Culture........................................................... 194
Notes ........................................................................................................................... 207
REFERENCES CITED................................................................................................... 210
1
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
“Time is an artist. I am a stone rubbing: the lineaments of a range of peaks, of the caves of a grotto. Before I came into this world, the picture was already
complete. As I slowly proceed along the watercourse of this segment of time, I discover my place in it. I see that the picture itself is a piece of history, a
depiction of the life of all women.” Chen Ran, A Private Life
In 1994, Lin Bai published her novel One Person’s War (Yigeren de zhanzheng)
at the Gansu People’s Publishing House, a publisher known for having released other
sexually-explicit novels.1 The response to the novel, which was printed with a picture of
a naked woman on the cover, was two-fold—it brought Lin quite rapidly into the public
eye, and caused her novel to be denounced as perverse and sexually inappropriate.2 Lin
would eventually change both the content of the novel and her publisher, after a long and
fruitless search to republish One Person’s War in its original form. What was it about this
particular novel that made it so distasteful to the reading public? More graphic depictions
of female sexual behavior had been published before, so why was this particular novel
deemed “perverse” and “sexually inappropriate?” The answer to this question suggests
the purpose of this dissertation.
This study is not the first to ask questions about the relationship among women,
modernity, and writing in China. Indeed, as we move ever closer to the hundredth
anniversary of the May Fourth Movement and its espousal of women’s liberation,
investigations of that project have become both more common and more relevant. The
iconoclastic “male feminist” writers of the May Fourth generation were extremely
2
concerned about the oppression of women that they saw as a result of a Confucian
patriarchal system. Recently more and more scholars of women’s writing have raised
questions about the accuracy of the May Fourth claim that women were kept completely
cloistered and illiterate in the “women’s quarters” with no ability or opportunities to add
their voices to the great Chinese literary tradition. While it is beyond the scope of this
dissertation to look back at the entire pre-modern period, it is grounded in this history.
Adding my voice to the chorus of others seeking to work against the May Fourth myth
and its lasting effects on the study of Chinese literature is just one of the goals of this
study.
The purpose of this project is twofold: first, to investigate in some detail the self-
referential fiction of the female avant-garde writers in the contemporary period and
second, to refine discussions of si (私) in contemporary women’s writing. Si is difficult to
translate into English; while often glossed as “private” this translation carries with it the
distinction between public and private in a Western context. The Chinese context is not
entirely synonymous. It is more accurate to translate si as a conglomeration of
“personal,” “private,” and “selfish;” or to discuss it in its traditional pairing with gong (公
public). To that end, a little clarification in terms is necessary.
First, it is appropriate to begin with a simple definition of what the concept of
private/privacy means in English. Bonnie McDougall provides a very useful discussion in
her Introduction to Chinese Conceptions of Privacy:
English now distinguishes between the adjectival form private, which may refer to selfish interests or to property rights (including access to property), and the substantive privacy, which denotes a state or condition relating to intimate conduct and relationships in which the subject controls access and makes autonomous decisions.3
3
With this definition in mind, as we consider these concepts in Chinese, “public” and
“private” might be closer to the traditional Chinese concepts of wai (外 outside) and nei
(内 inside). In general, men inhabit the world of wai, the outer “public” world, while
women inhabit the realm of nei, the inner chambers, the “private” domestic sphere.
However, the parallel breaks down when we turn to the family and try to determine its
place in this schema.
As Habermas discusses in the European context, as ideas of “the public”
developed, the family was taken as a private entity, theoretically beyond the intrusion of
the state but subject to the dictates of it.4 This is not entirely the same in the Chinese
context. The family, or what is thought of as the domestic sphere in the West, functions
differently in the Chinese context because it occupies a different place vis à vis the
construction of the state—it is the fundamental building block, and therefore like the state
it falls into the realm of gong. Again, in English, gong is usually translated as “public,”
but it has more to do with the idea of society.5 That is to say, what in Western thought is
called “public” is a conflation of both gong and wai in Chinese—and the site of that
conflation is the family. Going all the way back to Confucius, the hierarchical and
structured relationships within the family were both constructive of and parallel to the
expected behavior of a man in civil society. On a functional level this would manifest as
xiao (孝 filial piety), the way a son treats his father as the basis for and parallel to zhong
(忠 loyalty), the way a subject should act towards the ruler. As such, the family does not
occupy the same domestic-private space that it does in the Western context, but rather
4
that of gong; at the very it least becomes a place where these different fundamental ideas
intersect.
This being the case, it is possible to understand how forms of writing that refer to
the domestic and which might be looked at as private in the Western context, are
arguably still a part of the gong-public realm in the Chinese context.6 An example is a
letter written by Lin Juemin just a few days before his participation in the Guangzhou
uprising in March 1911. Although he thinks back on the some of very intimate moments
of his life with his wife, that he also talks about national problems as he faces his own
death shows the extent to which the state and the family were intertwined as public
spaces, and as I will argue, also male-oriented and heterosexually-aligned. The same can
be said of the very personal memoir accounts and the so-called “wound” fiction written
by both male and female authors after the end of the Cultural Revolution and the fall of
the Gang of Four—extremely intimate and personal stories are invested with meaning
precisely because of their relationship to the party-state. In this case, and as I will discuss
later, the party-state has taken the place of the traditional family, however the positioning
of the personal as a theoretically transparent aspect of an individual’s life within the
party-state remains the same as that of an individual in a traditional family.
Given this understanding of what constitutes gong, it is then possible to
understand what makes up si, as its dialectic opposite. What I mean to say is that
although there are two binaries at work here: man/woman and wai/nei, which in theory at
least correspond to each other, the gong/si pair does not follow along in the same parallel
manner. So then how to deal with this concept of si? As the dialectical opposite of gong,
in English it translates as “private,” but the kind of privacy which does not involve the
5
state or public society; one which is both personal and selfish and which, as I will show,
functions as a resistance to the projects of the state and informs the works of these
authors. It is also worth noting that when si has a negative connotation in Chinese
(which seems to be more often than not), it is precisely because of its bearing on the
personal at the exclusion of gong. As McDougall writes:
The Chinese word si covers both “private” and “privacy”; in parallel with English usage, si may refer to private ownership, private interests or selfishness, private as distinct from public service, private as underhand or secretive conduct, and privacy as a state of seclusion to which access is controlled by the subject.7
Rather than attempt to trace the development of concepts of si in Chinese thought,
literature, law, etc., or get involved in a long explication of the various mechanisms of
private versus public, it is McDougall’s last point which is the topic of interest in this
study. My argument stems from the idea that the avant-garde women writers of the post-
Mao period sought to create a space of female privacy in their literature as “a state of
seclusion to which access is controlled by the subject” as a space of resistance, and
investigates the ways in which they attempt to create this space.
What bearing, then, does this idea of si have on women’s writing? At first glance
it may seem somewhat problematic to employ more traditional terms such as gong and si
for theorizing contemporary Chinese women’s writing; however, despite their pre-
modern implications these terms are still quite relevant, much like Habermas describes
when he writes that, “[T]he very conditions that make the inherited language seem
inappropriate appear to require these words, however confused their employment.”8 In as
much as the English terms “public” and “private” come from their own tangled histories
and must be understood as the products of those histories, so too is it important to
understand how the traditional concepts of gong and si influence ideas about what is
6
public and what is private in contemporary China. Here, it is the question of women’s
resistance to the heteronational appropriation of their voices and bodies and the creation
of literary privacy which concerns this study. As such, my focus is more closely aligned
with the project of women’s literary feminism, particularly as discussed in recent works
by Amy Dooling, Wang Lingzhen, as well as a collection of essays edited by Mayfair
Yang.
As the title of her book indicates, Amy Dooling is primarily concerned with
understandings and constructions of gender and the projects of feminism as they pertain
to women writers in the first half of the twentieth century.9 She questions both the May
Fourth appropriation of the female image, as well as the scholarly interpretation which
reinforces women’s passivity by association. She notes:
It is one thing to critique the ways in which women and women’s liberation have been strategically appropriated by contending modernizing discourses, it is quite another to conclude that such processes effectively precluded women from asserting their own visions, voices, and desires as historical subjects.10
Dooling makes a point of distinguishing between women writers and feminist writers.
Her distinction has to do with their purposes for writing—the feminist writer specifically
seeks to question performative gender and sexual norms created by society. To that end,
their works are often more didactic, and therefore seemingly less “artistic.” Dooling
questions this literary judgment. She reads certain autobiographical forms of writing,
such as the diary, as a part of the feminist project. Dooling’s idea of “alternative and
autonomous discursive spaces for women,”11 particularly as created by autobiographical
or self-reference is of special importance to my discussion below. Her discussions of
womanhood and forms of literary creation are invaluable, as well as the way she
positions literary images of women and feminism against masculine discourses of
7
nationalism and modernity. However, while I draw on her discussion of literary
feminism and use it as a foundation for my own inquiry it is primarily questions of si-
privacy which motivate this dissertation.
Wang Lingzhen also takes a feminist reading of modern and contemporary
Chinese women’s autobiographical practice in her book, Personal Matters: Women’s
Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth-Century China. Although motivated by an
interest in women’s semi-autobiographical privacy fiction, the central question of my
study is at heart very similar to the one Wang Lingzhen asks. As she says, “The
subaltern—modern and contemporary Chinese women here—do sometimes speak. The
question, however, is how we can hear their voices without reducing them to the
meanings produced by the dominant mode of representation.”12 Indeed it is as much the
case with the fiction of the avant-garde women writers as it is of contemporary women’s
autobiography that:
[T]he selves they represent do not necessarily correspond to the dominant, institutionalized notions of the self and writing. They either fall outside the frame of official history and literary studies or are appropriated by the dominant cultural discourse to further codify female personhood as the other/mirror of the endorsed male self: either feminine/traditional/virtuous or immoral/transgressive/dangerous. This explains why women’s autobiographical writings have been on the one hand largely dismissed by established scholars of history and literature but on the other hand read by the public as revealing the truth of women writers’ virtuous/selfless or narcissistic/transgressive lives.13
Wang’s assessment of the appropriation of women’s autobiographical writing reveals the
complexities of interpretation of women’s autobiographical practice, complexities which
are equally applicable to the female avant-garde writers. In addition to issues of
conformity/transgression which Wang discusses above, critics of women’s privacy fiction
also generally fall into two camps, These debates generally focus on whether these
8
works represent a contribution to the literary canon or should be read as soft
pornography, as well as whether these works show a strong feminist and political sense
or are simply the trivial, overly personal jottings of women seeking to capitalize on the
market’s recent voyeuristic fascination with women’s lives.
Feminism and the call to relocate, revitalize, and reappropriate women’s writing
are certainly motivating factors behind this work as much as the many others, such as
Dooling’s and Wang’s, which have recently come out both in China and in the West.
However, it is also interesting that none of these authors themselves describe their works
as feminist, in the same way that they resist the label “woman writer,” no matter who is
applying that label. While it is impossible to separate the fact of “woman” from these
authors and their fiction, ultimately I argue that they are attempting to write beyond
gendered experience in the feminist sense. That is to say, that rather than focus on
“women’s writing” or representing women’s lived experiences, these writers are
narrating individual selves in their fiction, ones which exist outside of the socially-
proscribed roles determined for them as “women.” For to talk about gendered experience
is to talk about feminism, as in the oft-repeated phrase “the personal is political.”14 As
Wang reasons, “The personal is political, not only in the sense that what is personal is
socially and politically defined, but also because the personal can never be reduced to a
purely ideological frame and thus always stands counter to dominant appropriations.”15
The problem with reading the personal as a counter to dominant appropriations is the
long history of male appropriation of the female voice, form, and even biography in the
Chinese literary tradition. Also, in treating these works as political in their intent,
feminist readings force these works into the realm of the gong-public and in doing so run
9
the risk of both denying the fundamentally si-private topical nature of these works as well
as, ironically, falling into the same trap of essentializing female behavior and desire. To
put it another way, as Wang Lingzhen writes, “A feminist approach to women’s
autobiographical practice requires a new perspective that focuses not on what
autobiography is or should be but on what autobiographical writing does or can do.”16
Applying this line of reasoning to the semi-autographical privacy fiction of the female
avant-garde writers, I argue that these authors’ overall interest in creating a private space
for themselves through the use of the self-referential semi-autobiographical form (as one
of the most important narrative techniques in their fiction) requires a discussion of what
that fiction both is and does, to use Wang’s words. To discuss what that fiction “should
be” risks either a return to more structuralist discussions of gender essentialism or forces
it to otherwise fit into dominant cultural and social expectations, while asking what this
fiction “can do” implies a fundamentally political and public intent. In focusing on
issues of privacy, then, this study walks the fine line between “should be” and “can do.”
That is to say, while the motivating interest behind this study is absolutely feminist in
nature, it is the lens of si-privacy, rather than feminism per se, that will provide the means
to interpret and understand these stories.
The collection Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational
China, edited by Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, grounds my own focus on expressions of si-
privacy and the use of the female image. Coming out of a conference on women and the
media in transnational China, which Yang defines both culturally and linguistically, this
collection of essays looks at the development of the public sphere as a masculine space,
and how women both work to create their own spaces within this arena as well as how
10
they resist the discourse of gender politics or use that discourse to their own ends. In a
certain respect, it can be said that this collection represents a specific (local), gendered
response to Habermas’ universalized theory of the public sphere. Looking at such varied
topics as film, television, the first women’s museum in Hunan, women’s role in consumer
society, and the development of state-sponsored feminism as a masculine discourse,
Yang describes her focus as “two spatializations of women in the realm of cultural
production in transnational China:”
First, the book will examine the positioning of women in domestic or public space in Chinese mass media and public discourse. Here, although figures of women are prevalent, they appear mainly as objects of representations by men; women are encoded and excluded from the production of discourse. Second, the book also documents what Lefebvre calls the fugitive “representational spaces” of women who live a semiclandestine life and try to carve out a larger space for themselves in the male public discursive world.17
Much like Yang and her contributors, I am interested in the ways in which the female
avant-garde writers construct a space for themselves, as well as how they resist the
male/state/heterosexually appropriated image of women. Moreover, in attempting to
answer the question of what it means when these writers publish (i.e. make public) their
works of so-called “privacy literature” Yang and the other contributors’ discussions of
the nature and function of the male-dominated sphere of public discourse, especially
those of feminist theorists Dai Jinhua and Li Xiaojiang, are invaluable. Ultimately,
however, this study seeks to understand not how these works function on a public level,
but rather how these authors articulate a space of si-privacy which necessarily precedes,
and to a certain extent hinders, its public reception.
Without these works, and the many others like them, which complicate the very
simple picture of women presented by the May Fourth writers, my work would not be
11
possible. And yet without the addition of “public” and “private” to discussions of
women’s literary expression it is difficult to fully appreciate how the male May Fourth
writers were able to erase women’s voices so effectively that it should take almost a
century to relocate them.18 This erasure, I will argue, comes from the male intellectual
appropriation of the female image and voice. Although this erasure is not unique to the
May Fourth writers, it is in the May Fourth period that the image of women becomes
completely overwritten by the idea of the nation, so much so that women’s liberation
largely became a synonym for national salvation. As Dooling says:
In terms of Chinese feminism, then, the fact that the idea of the emancipated woman was from the outset “mainstreamed” may well mean that the conditions conducive to the emergence of a subversive female subject never fully materialized. It may help explain, for instance, the thwarted formation of autonomous cultural institutions—presses, magazines, bookstores, and so forth—thorough which women themselves could promote and represent issues of importance to them.19
As a result of this male and national appropriation, woman’s voices have been largely
covered over, relegated forever to the realm of allegory. It is for this reason that recent
scholars of women’s writing have found such an urgent need to ask what constitutes an
authentic female voice, to uncover it from the shroud of traditional literary interpretation
which cloaks it. The many scholars who contributed to Chinese Concepts of Privacy,
which touches on the expression of si in various forms throughout Chinese history from
the ritual bronzes of the Zhou to the writers of the post-Mao period, provide the
foundation and much of the vocabulary which I will use to more fully explore the female
avant-garde writers’ project of privacy, and their resistance to the publicly co-opted
image of “woman.” A simple overview of the appropriation that these women seek to
12
work against is helpful to understanding the topography of the literary landscape
inhabited by the avant-garde women writers of the 1980s and 1990s.
The male appropriation of the female image and voice has a long tradition in
Chinese literature, with the relationship between a ruler and his ministers thought of as
parallel to the relationship between a husband and a wife. This can be seen, for example,
in the standard political interpretation of the Classic of Poetry (Shijing), which holds that
poems in which the female voice bemoans the absence or loss of her husband or lover are
read as allegorical of the male poet’s feelings towards his ruler. This allegorical
treatment of female desire as symbolic of male political yearnings would continue on in
poetry throughout imperial history.
With the rise of Neo-Confucianism and the Cult of Qing in the Song Dynasty and
the accompanying obsession with female chastity, over time male literati’s use of the
female voice became more and more associated with naturalness, as opposed to the
cultured/cultivated male voice. To invoke a woman’s voice allowed the male writer, in
theory, to access a more true and pure form of emotional existence than he could as an
educated literatus. We see this technique of appropriation more in fiction as it develops
as a genre; as Maram Epstein reminds us in her work Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy,
Authenticity, and Engendered Meanings in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction the poetics of
gender and the highly sentimentalized aesthetics of the cult of qing were one means by
which the male literatus found the freedom necessary for reclaiming and expressing his
own authentic feelings, although it was not without complication. She writes:
[I]n fact, in most writers’ hands, unconventional behavior, emblematic of authenticity, became a necessary stage in reclaiming the conventional orthodox values of filiality and loyalty as authentic rather than rote. The appropriation of a highly sentimentalized femininity was one of these unconventional expressions of
13
authenticity. The imaginings of a reinvigorated literati culture based on the subjective and dynamic qualities of qing animate much of late Ming and Qing fiction and drama; yet, even in fiction, the tensions between the desire for the benefits of community-centered orthodoxy and individualistic authenticity were never fully resolved.20
This tension Epstein describes revolves around concerns about the motivation for
invoking the feminine in written subjective expression. As she notes, these motives
should ultimately privilege gong, that is, “community-centered orthodoxy,” over si,
“individualistic authenticity.” Thus even here it is possible to see how a discussion of si-
privacy is relevant to the development of fiction and the female image.
In addition to these more personal appropriations of the female image, literati
writers of fiction in the Ming and Qing could also invoke the female body as the site of
both desire (欲 yu) and emotions (情 qing). This would allow them to explore the
consequences of individual action and morality, as well as present a critique of the mores
of the time, as in works like The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jinping mei), and perhaps the
greatest work of traditional fiction, The Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng),
amongst others. The publication of The Dream of the Red Chamber is important not only
for the ways in which it presents the height of development in the traditional novel, and
as such the opportunities for playing with the problems of conformity and transgression,
as Keith McMahon talks about in his work Causality and Containment in Seventeenth-
century Chinese Fiction; but also for the way it spurred women to write as they never had
before.
These traditional appropriations of the female image and voice set the stage for
the Republican period. Writers and intellectuals during the Republican period came to
feel that the reason why China had become so weak was that it was backward. For them,
14
Chinese ideas of gender and marriage, for example, had not evolved in step with the West
and still clung to outmoded traditional ideas, particularly Confucianism. As a result of
this, Republican-era intellectuals’ writing began to be focused on women: both the (Neo-
)Confucian prescriptions for women, and women’s physical bodies. These intellectuals
came to the conclusion that women, and particularly women’s bodies, were symbolic of
the fate of China. Traditional women were physically weak, hobbled by footbinding,
uneducated, and relegated to the home, with little or no chance for contact with the
outside world. The answer to women’s physical weakness, as symbolic of national
weakness, also came in female form—Nora, from Ibsen’s play “A Doll’s House.” From
the beginning of the May Fourth Movement in 1919, the forces of nationalism and
feminism have been intertwined, as when the May Fourth reformers encouraged young
women to become “Chinese Noras” and reject tradition—only in this way could the
Chinese people and the Chinese nation become strong again. Thus, although promoting a
pro-woman stance, the May Fourth (and later reformers) use of the female image and
voice towards their own ends marks a continuation of this tradition of male appropriation,
rather than a break from it.
Interest in individual emotional authenticity as a part of the cult of qing
(sentiment) also became a fundamental part of the May Fourth writers’ project. Haiyan
Lee, in her recent work Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-
1950, looks at the role qing plays in changing conceptions of subjectivity, modernity and
nationalism in the first half of the twentieth century. She identifies the modern subject as
being a sentimental one; the modern nation is then, as she calls it, a “community of
sympathy.” Her project is to provide a reading of sentiment as it developed from the late
15
Qing “Confucian structure of feeling,” which finds qing expressed as social virtue, to the
May Fourth, “enlightenment structure of feeling,” in which qing becomes synonymous
with modernity, subjectivity, and free love/desire, and finally ends with the
“revolutionary structure of feeling” in which qing was harnessed by the Communists to
stir nationalist sentiment and loyalty to the state. Lee’s focus on modern subjectivity and
sentiment in her work is important to this study of women’s literary privacy. The
question she seeks to answer is, “In what sense was the changing meaning of qing—from
asexual virtue to romantic love, sexual desire, and patriotic fervor—part and parcel of the
changing conceptions of self, gender, and community in modern China?”21 Lee provides
a potential framework for discussing the state and society against which these authors
were writing when she discusses the various “structures of feeling.” She asks, “[H]ow
the discourses of sentiment situated the individual in society, what kind of power
relations they sought to undermine and reinforce, and what kind of community they
endorsed and sought to realize.”22 In as much as I too am concerned with the relationship
between the self and society and the ways in which the female authorial self writes
against the state this paper follows very much in her footsteps; however, unlike Lee, my
primary focus is neither to understand the changing nature of emotion, nor is it oriented
towards discussions of nationalism and modernity. It is rather the question of women’s
resistance and the creation of a private literary space which concerns this study.
As the Republican Period continued, there were more and more changes in
China’s political, economic, and social climate. Women, for example, were allowed to
leave the home and seek employment, and footbinding was outlawed. Also, the idea that
a person was free to choose whom he or she loved and married became more prominent,
16
although certainly still subject to social perceptions and constraints. These changes also
appeared in the literature of the day. Much of it tends to focus on a young woman
seeking freedom and making choices between her ideal and her gender role. As Meng
Yue discusses in her article, “Female Images and National Myth,” these young women
and their journey to education, maturity and independence were allegories for China’s
education, maturation, and independence.23 In the end, the young women in these stories
often end up choosing what is best for the nation rather than what they would themselves
prefer, because they are metaphors, and therefore, not “real.”
As Meng shows, when we consider Republican era women’s writing in particular,
often there is a conflict between the single woman’s fortune and the fate of the nation.
Women had been placed in the precarious position of appearing as symbols of their
country’s journey to maturity and independence, and their writing reflects this feeling of
being pulled in two directions. Their choices could not be made just for themselves, but
rather always with the good of the nation in mind. We also find, as with writers like Lu
Yin, that writing became a forum for reflection on the self and female desire under the
shadow of male discourses.24 Nevertheless, the women in Lu Yin’s stories are still
symbolic of China, and their journey is still an allegorical one. Works that would seem to
show women as independent still place them in relation to men. Even writers like Lu Yin,
who wrote freely about such subjects as female-female desire in works like “Lishi’s
Diary” (“Lishi de riji”) ultimately end with the female protagonist leaving her (often
schoolmate) female lover for a man.
As we turn then to the Mao period, from 1949 to 1976, the idea of male-female
equality begins to look more and more like male-female similarity, that is, men and
17
women are not just equal they are the same. This certainly complicated, if not effectively
erased, all gender difference at least in theory. Official party rhetoric of the time
encouraged young people to become “revolutionary bolts” in the machinery of
Communism. Party propaganda again and again depicted images of a masculinized
female body hard at work alongside her male counterparts. At the same time more
feminine gender expressions, such as permed hair styles and make-up, were denounced as
“bourgeois” and “reactionary.” This is not to suggest that on an individual level women
somehow began to think of themselves as men, or that people were no longer aware of
biological differences, but rather that the way gender was both marked and read had
become a somewhat masculinized form of “neutral.” We also find an injecting of the
state-public into the individual-private, as the Communist government intruded more and
more into the lives of its people. As discussed earlier, as the party-state took over the
place left vacant by the imperial government, much like the situation in pre-modern
times, the family was still conceived of as a gong-public space. As Meng explains, in
this period too, women and women’s bodies were also symbolic, although now they had
become representative of either an oppressed class or of the party and the party’s
authority.
After his talks at Yan’an, where Mao announced the idea that “literature serves
the people,” we find that the idea that the party has the authority to intrude into the
traditionally more private parts of life is reinforced by literature. Because of this, very
strict regulations were placed on what kinds of literature could and could not be
produced. Meng details the three kinds of story lines that can be found in this period. In
the first story line, a woman from a “lower” class is exploited by a man, typically from a
18
“higher” class. When she is liberated by the Communist party it is symbolic of the
liberation of her whole class. In such stories, the female protagonist stands for the
laborers, the peasants, and all of the other people that the Communist party claimed as its
own, just as the man who exploits her in the story represents the traditional, feudal-
minded, landowning classes that the Communists opposed. An example of this sort of
narrative is The White-Haired Girl (Bai mao nü) by He Jingzhi. According to Meng, what
is important in this kind of storyline is that the protagonist is female—she is exploited,
often sexually, weak, and unable to help herself so that she needs the help of the party.
This serves to reinforce the party’s ultimate authority, as a father/protector/provider.
In the second story line from this period we find an individual “mobile” female
character who matures through her own experiences and encounters many “immobile”
male characters, ultimately choosing to live as a Communist. In most cases, this means
that she chooses to love, and marry a Communist man, often against great odds or at great
cost to herself. We can see an example of this in Yang Mo’s story, “Song of Youth”
(“Qingchun zhi ge”). As Meng discusses, this kind of storyline echoes the earlier
Republican narrative where the woman is an allegory of the national myth: as China
developed it passed through many stages, ultimately choosing the correct path, that of
Communism. So too does the female protagonist move past many men, ultimately
choosing the “right” one—the Communist. Again, this kind of literature serves to
reinforce the authority of the party. Much of women’s writing during this time falls into
this category.
In the third and final story line, we find a politically mature female character
reconstructing a male political “infant” as a good Communist. As Meng explains, the
19
female figure provides the means by which the male becomes educated and able to enter
society as a functioning member. These kinds of stories reinforce the authority of the
state. They also play on the myths of the liberation of women, and women’s equality. In
this particular genre that we find the Communist “strong woman”—this era’s response to
masculinist discourse. Meng shows how the “stronger,” more mature woman, who has
been liberated from the shackles of her gender by the Communists, yet who is actually
still bound by heteronormative gender roles, acts as mother-figure, and effectively raises
her male counterpart to enter society as a fully-developed Communist. The woman is
there to fill this role and this role only. As such, she is only equal to her male counterpart
on a superficial level.
Both Republican and Mao-era literature erase the feminist journey of an
individual woman by placing her in relation to others. The female protagonists may be
more mobile, have a better education and more opportunities than her pre-1911
counterparts, but she is still defined by the men in her life. It is in the 1980s and 1990s,
and specifically in the works of the avant-garde women writers, that the journey of the
individual woman finds expression, away from her relation to the rest of the world, and
men in particular. It is in this period, in the works of these authors, that it is possible to
find women creating a literary space for their personal expressions of self.
The era of reform and opening in the 1980s when these women are writing is in
itself important to understanding their project of female literary privacy. These authors
were all born just before the Cultural Revolution, and grew up during this period when in
theory the individual was subsumed by the state. It is no coincidence, however, that after
Deng Xiaoping’s reforms increased both the acceptance of individual expression as well
20
as individual ability to consume according to personal tastes, that Lin Bai, Xu Kun, and
Hai Nan began to write and publish fiction. As the boundaries between the state-public
and individual-private resolidified, these authors found the opportunity to create a space
apart from the constraints of traditional social expectation and understanding. Moreover,
the Fourth World Conference on Women organized by the UN Commission on the Status
of Women held in Beijing in 1995 did as much to open up new opportunities for women
writers to publish their writing as it did to commercialize that writing and call into
question their motivations for writing. As such, the works of the female avant-garde
writers should be read in light of the “culture fever” that came in the wake of Deng’s
“Open Door” (gaige kaifang) reforms, rather than as the commercialized, hyper-
sexualized writing of the “body” writers, such as Wei Hui, who expose the private details
of their sexual experiences for commercial gain. In the last two decades, specifically in
the works of the avant-garde women writers, these writers have been able to use his
period of cultural opening to narrate their private, individual selves in their literature, as
distinct or distanced from their relationship to the rest of the world, and masculine-
centered society in particular. It is in this period, in the works of these authors, that it is
finally possible to find women creating a literary space for their personal expressions of
self. In this sense, their writing is best described as si-private.
However, even after Deng Xiaoping’s reforms and the increasing validity of
individual expression, the persistent social norm that defines a woman in relation to a
man remained in the public consciousness. As contemporary feminist critic and theorist
Dai Jinhua says:
Since 1949, Chinese society was on the whole one of gender equality. But there was also a customary way of thinking that women must belong to a man
21
in order to be a person. She has no status of her own. As a wife or even as a lover you have a status which your relationship with men can force on you. If you belong to no one, then there are doubts about your character. You are thought strange. People will either think you are a corrupted woman who sleeps with many men, or that you are an abnormal, sick woman with problems. It’s as if the whole world has a duty to monitor single women.25
Despite the state-sponsored feminism which had been promoted in China since at least
1949, the underlying patriarchal hegemony has remained intact. Moreover, because the
literature of the twentieth-century appeared to show women as more and more liberated
from this system while actually subtly reaffirming it, the female body retained its
symbolic currency. That is to say, because the female image and voice only have validity
in relation to a man, their meaning is always determined by men. Given this context, a
woman’s voice and even body never truly belong to herself, and as such, she is never
really “real.”
The desire to relocate women’s voices informs the second purpose of this project:
an investigation of the avant-garde women writers of the post-Mao period. Much time
has been spent trying to answer the question of what women’s writing is, and how to
identify it, particularly in the late imperial and Republican periods. Relatively less
attention has been paid to the post-Mao period. It is my belief that in addition to looking
at how women wrote and how they positioned themselves vis à vis society, that it is also
necessary to fully flesh out how they resist the appropriation of the female image and
create instead a space for themselves. As Yang writes:
[D]uring the Maoist era on the Mainland, while making strides in women’s education, basic rights, and employment, state feminism was concerned mainly to give women entrance to the public realm of labor, while women’s production in the public realm of discourse was denied by the dominance of state discourse
and by a state “erasure of gender” (xingbie mosha), especially female gender. In the current period of China’s entry into global capitalism, at the same time that women are in decline in the public sphere of labor and are being sexualized
22
by a male business and entertainment culture, the heightened awareness of gender difference and discrimination also contributes to the awareness of women’s subjectivity.26 As Yang notes, both the Mao-era “interruption” in women’s, and indeed everyone’s,
articulations of a si-self in favor of gong-transparent state rhetoric and ideology, as well
as the post-Mao resurgence of sexological discourse based on gender difference, are
important to understanding how women articulate their own subjectivity. However it is
important to remember that reading those women who participate in exhibitions of the
newly re-feminized female body or who capitalize on the re-sexualization of the female
body as simply victims of male culture also negate their expressions of self as resistance
to both the de-feminized Mao-era woman, as well as the de-sexualized virtuous wife and
mother of eras past. In order to locate this resistance we must look more at the concept of
si. The central question I ask of these writers is how they articulate a literary space of si
for themselves in their works, and how this articulation sets these writers apart from other
groups of women writers of the twentieth-century.
What makes the writing of these avant-garde women writers different and unique
is the way in which they use both gender and sexuality to resist the publicly/nationally
co-opted image of the heterosexual woman and thereby create in their works a private
place away from the intrusion of the state. Tze-lan Sang’s work on the modern
development of depictions and discussions of female-female same-sex desire is highly
informative here. Just as it is necessary to be careful about using the words “public” and
“private” in English to represent the Chinese terms gong and si, so too is it important to
avoid the transnational trap, as it were, of simply importing the Western history and
terminology of feminism and same-sex desire onto the Chinese case. Sang’s primary
23
concern is to understand how depictions of female homosocial and homoerotic behavior
went from being considered innocent and sweet to titillating and finally destructive and
abnormal. Her work directly informs my own, for it is my contention that the avant-
garde women writers play with constructions of gender and female sexuality as narrative
techniques, resisting the publicly co-opted image of the heterosexual woman by
presenting alternative forms of female desire. This goes to the heart of the question
which I originally asked, as to why One Person’s War was denounced. When the avant-
garde women writers describe alternative forms of female sexuality they present female
desire in a way that is not aligned with the state and society, and as such, fall outside the
acceptable norms. This use of female sexuality as a narrative technique is directly related
to the concept of si-privacy as indicating both intimacy as well as obstructed access, and
is what makes their works ones of resistance, as Sang says, “Autonomous female
sexuality, mediated neither by patriarchal control associated with marriage nor by the
demands of reproduction, constitutes a threat to the model of sexual and marital harmony
upheld by the dominant discourse.”27 This threatening sexuality typically takes one of
three forms, that is, desire for oneself (masturbation), desire for other women which may
fall anywhere along the spectrum of homosociality to homoeroticism to homosexuality;
and desire for no-one (i.e. the women who does not have sex at all). For example, in
some narratives Lin Bai depicts female autoerotic and homosexual behavior, while others
suggest more homosocial friendships, or subtly suggest female-female homoerotic
longings.
In Lin’s writing, female-female desire or self-desire takes on the uplifting
attributes of qing, its sublime nature. Heterosexual relationships are portrayed at best as
24
strange or somehow twisted, and at worst as destructive and unhealthy. In terms of
placing Lin in the imagined tradition of women’s private writing, where we find weak or
unattractive male characters in Lu Yin’s fiction, for example, we find aberrant and
abhorrent male characters in Lin Bai’s works. I believe that this reflects the different
times in which these two women were writing; for Lu Yin male-female relationships,
while damaging to a woman’s independence, were still more clearly demarcated by
gender roles that had not yet been destabilized by the Communist project of
equality/similarity, whereas for Lin Bai, commonly held ideas of gender had been
effectively neutralized for the last thirty years during Mao’s rule. For her, male-female
relationships are not only particularly damaging to women, they are also completely
unfamiliar and unsettling. Lin often describes her writing as a tool with which to fend off
the oppression of cultural norms, metaphoric meaning, and the male gaze and carve out a
space where a self, in this case a female self, can exist; a tool which revels in the
individual and personal.
To present another example: although she writes with the same tools and for the
same purpose, Chen Ran in her novel A Private Life (Siren shenghuo), tackles both
female-female desire and heterosexual desire, opting in the end for a first non-sexual then
autoerotic option. That Lin’s and Chen’s works are very different speaks to their
individual styles. That they use the same kinds of narrative techniques to create similar
spaces for women’s literary expression and individuality speaks to the project of this
group of writers as a whole. As Sang writes:
In this time of many contradictions, the representations of female homoeroticism by serious women writers such as Chen Ran and Lin Bai are caught in a whirlwind of competing interpretations. While feminist literary critics (including some seemingly liberal male critics) in the PRC extol the authentic “female
25
consciousness” and the portrayal of “sisterhood” in their works, conservative male readers accuse them of a whole gamut of crimes ranging from the neglect of women’s duty as loving mothers of mankind to solipsism, self-indulgence, and intellectual pettiness. Furthermore, profit-oriented publishers package their works as food for the masses’ voyeuristic consumption.28
In extolling “female consciousness and sisterhood” or in condemning the works as
lacking female virtue we can see the essentializing of femininity, which these writers
question. This questioning of an essential femininity is then coupled with the insistence
on mediated si-privacy, as when critics describe these works as “self-indulgent” and
“solipsistic.” It is my hope that by accompanying discussions of female sexuality with
discussions of the self and si that it will be possible to avoid this trap that Sang describes,
while also highlighting the inherent contradictions that come with the making public
(publishing) of these private discourses.
Moreover, as a result of public expectations about the way women’s private lives
“should be” expressed, we should understand this insistence on alternative forms of
female sexuality as another kind of resistance as well. Wang Lingzhen shows
convincingly how the autobiographies of Yu Luojin, as a temporal precursor to the four
authors included here and the subject of much debate, were scrutinized and ultimately
devalued as a result of her sexual experiences. The fact that she had been divorced twice
as well as having admitted to at least a couple of extra-marital affairs made it possible to
dismiss her experiences—to silence her voice—as that of a “decadent and ‘careless’
woman.”29 As Wang points out:
For a woman, becoming a public figure always meant exposing herself to charges premised on the vulnerable and personal mark of female gender. Her public career was constantly endangered by rumors about her private life, which was sexually connoted and repeatedly emphasized as the most important realm for investments of both state interest and conventional values. Women who wrote or otherwise performed in public more directly
26
faced this danger inherent in their social existence as gendered beings. In its reception, women’s writing was very much determined by the gendered embodiment or signature of its authors.30
Here again we find echoes of the same traditional values which concerned writing
women in the Ming and Qing. Despite all of the feminist and socialist rhetoric of the
preceding fifty or so years, women were still associated with a domestic sphere that,
while not a part of the wai-public social sphere, should still be transparent to and in line
with the values of the gong-public nation/party-state. When a woman enters the wai-
public social sphere, whether she be a writer or otherwise, any aspects of her self which
fall outside the gong-public boundaries (i.e. those aspects labeled as si-private) naturally
become the means by which that woman would or could be discredited. And so it is from
this perspective that the works of the female avant-garde writers can be understood as
operating on a second level of resistance. By focusing on alternative forms of female
sexuality these writers not only resist the appropriation of the female form, but they also
effectively take the very means by which their writing might be publicly discredited and
use it for their own purposes.
Lastly, the way in which these authors incorporate self-reference as another key
narrative technique is fundamental to this project. I do not mean to suggest that these
works are autobiographical, but that in privileging the private, feeling self over
mainstream readings of womanhood and femininity, the use of self-reference as a
narrative device is a necessary part of their project of mediated privacy. Lee discusses
how:
The repeated appeal to personal experience, the elevation of eyewitness accounts above grandiose histories and fantastic tales, the belief in the importance of painting a “true picture” of “real events” without “touching up,” the assumption that the life experience of an ordinary person, simply because it is faithfully told,
27
should be of interest to others—all of this points to a new epistemic paradigm, one that is best encapsulated in the concept of “authenticity.”31
As before, Lee is not specifically referring to the works of these female avant-garde
writers; nonetheless, her point holds true. As already noted, because these writers are
primarily concerned with the expression of selfhood, and in that self find the means to
resist the appropriation of the female image and voice, to invoke the personal and elevate
it over the collective helps to further and strengthen their creation of private literary
space. In very concrete terms this means that they may inject personal details of their
lives into their narratives by using a fictional-autobiographical form, use the “I” narrator,
or use other forms of self-reference to make more concrete the sense that these works are
the works of a real, authentic subject rather than mere symbols. It is tempting, of course,
to over-read these narratives as being the “truth” of these authors’ lived experiences,
especially in terms of their feminist dimensions; much like the traps of essentializing
femininity and sexuality which Sang describes above, this too will be necessary site of
critical inquiry.
Terminology
The words “personal” and “private” are very blunt terms in English. They could
refer to those things which are not public, that is, outside the purview of the state and
civil society; they could just as easily refer to those intimate, subjective details which
separate one individual from another. Although it is far easier, and perhaps more
accurate to simply use the Chinese terms si and gong, this does nothing to further an
understanding of them in English, nor to help distinguish between the various
permutations that they present. To that end I reserve the right to use a flexible
28
terminology in this dissertation. In the case of si, I will most frequently use the terms:
“personal,” “private,” “selfish,” and “the self” depending on context, although I may also
attach the term si itself as a prefix (as above) if clarification is necessary. Likewise, for
gong I will most frequently translate it as “public,” again attaching the Chinese term as a
prefix to the English one if it helps to make my argument more clear. For those terms
which have also been investigated in other studies, such as female-female desire in Tze-
lan Sang’s work, or women’s literary feminism in Amy Dooling’s, I will defer to their
usages, clarifying if and when necessary.
Structure
As this study is primarily a textual analysis, the structure is fairly simple. This
dissertation focuses specifically on the ways in which the avant-garde women writers
consciously tried to resist the appropriation of the female image by imagining and writing
about alternate forms of female sexuality, and how this conscious resistance is informed
and created by the si-personal; it is not concerned with an investigation of any and all
women’s private writing. In Chapter I I consider various forms of self writing, including
autobiography, “individualized writing” (个人化写作 gerenhua xiezuo), and “private
writing” (私人化写作 sirenhua xiezuo). The goal of this chapter is to understand some
of the fundamental distinctions between the publicly-oriented autobiographical form, and
then inward-looking self-referential fiction of the female avant-garde writers. While
these generic classifications are both large and fluid, in order to understand how female
avant-garde writers create a space of privacy in their fiction, and how that space functions
29
as one of resistance, it is necessary to be able to distinguish it from other self-referential
forms.
In Chapter II I consider the question of what it means when these women make
public (publish) their works of private fiction. When the female avant-garde writers
publish their fiction, they cross the boundary between the private and the public sphere.
Their literary works exist in a borderland which is neither completely private (because it
has been published), nor entirely public (because of the insistence on inaccessible private
experience). In this chapter I will consider the theoretical implications of the private
body made public in terms of the corporeal feminisms of Dai Jinhua and Li Xiaojiang, as
well as the mediated consumption of these bodies as a kind of borderland, a term I
borrow from Gloria Anzaldúa.
In each of Chapters III through V I focus on three different avant-garde writers.
For each of these authors I will consider their development as a writer in relation to their
overall corpus of writing, their use of alternate forms of female sexual desire, as well as
autobiography and self-reference as narrative techniques, and how and to what end they
are concerned with resisting the appropriation of the female body/image. Of course each
writer takes a slightly different approach, and I will present the unique aspects of their
writing alongside these topoi, which bind them together.
In Chapter III, I look at two of Xu Kun’s works: her collection of essays, Notes
from My Life (Wode rensheng biji), and her semi-autobiographical novel The Twenty-Two
Nights of Spring (Chuntian de ershi’erge yewan). Herself an academic and theorist
trained at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Xu Kun’s works as a whole tend to
have a strong theoretical undertone, particularly when it comes to feminism. And while
30
she, like the other writers considered here, also portrays how damaging heterosexual
relationships can be for women, her depictions of female sexuality tend to be closer to
social norms than those of Lin Bai and Hai Nan, for example. Xu Kun maintains what
might be described as the most status quo position while still working towards the
ultimate goal of creating a space for herself in her literature. As such, her writing can be
thought of as one end of this spectrum of privacy literature.
In Chapter IV, I consider Lin Bai’s self-referential novel One Person’s War and
her own collection of memories and observations, The Gold of Previous Incarnations:
Notes on My Life (Qianshi de huangjin: Wode rensheng biji). While there have been
many scholarly studies written about One Person’s War since its initial publication in
1994, most of this has been a theoretical tug-of-war between one group of critics who
argue that Lin’s fiction is little better than pornography and lacking in any literary value
and another group who argue that Lin’s work is ultimately representative of the feminist
cause and an indictment of patriarchal culture. While I too argue that Lin’s fiction
ultimately can be read in a feminist light, it must first be understood in light of the self (or
selves) that Lin narrates in her fiction and the way that she creates a space of si-privacy
where that self can exists on its own terms, away from the demands of heteronormative
society. Moreover, I also discuss the way that Lin creates this si-private space of self-
reflection and self-creation not just in One Person’s War but also in her other works, and
between her other works, in a way that produces a web that the reader can only partially
penetrate—they are able to enter the space the Lin creates only in as much as they are
familiar with Lin’s other works. That this web of meaning is never fully open to anyone,
produces yet another aspect of the private in Lin’s private writings.
31
In Chapter V I consider Hai Nan and her A Dissolute Life: Notes from My Life
(Shuixing shenghuo: Wode rensheng biji) as well as her work of self-referential fiction,
My Lovers (Wode qingrenmen). Hai Nan is neither as academic a writer as Xu Kun, nor
does she weave the same kind of poetic web throughout her body of writing like Lin Bai;
however, like both of the other authors, she too narrates two different kinds of self in her
works. Hai Nan’s A Dissolute Life: Notes from My Life is different from both Xu Kun
and Lin Bai in that she spends very little time talking about her development as a writer,
or her feelings about the current social conditions. Rather, Hai Nan covers much of the
same subject material in her A Dissolute Life: Notes from My Life as she does in her work
of self-referential fiction, My Lovers. As a result, comparing the two different works
provides a more focused example of how she creates a space of si-privacy in her fiction,
as compared with the “literary self-portrait” she narrates in A Dissolute Life: Notes from
My Life.
Finally in my conclusion I will consider the concept of “women’s writing” and
the differences between these avant-garde writers and the “body writers,” a group of
female writers who appear around the same time as the female avant-garde writers and
who write about similar kinds of subjects (women’s private and intimate experiences),
but for very different reasons. Works such as Wei Hui’s Shanghai Baby (Shanghai
baobei) and Mian Mian’s Candy (Tang), with their explicit descriptions of female desire
and sexual activity can be more aptly described as exhibitionist works expressly intended
for public consumption. As such, this kind of writing also falls outside the scope of this
study, where the primary focus is on the creation of women’s literary privacy and the
feminist politics of the self.
32
Notes 1 Tze-lan Sang, The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 176. 2 Ibid. 3 Bonnie McDougall and Anders Hansson ed., Chinese Concepts of Privacy, (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 5. 4 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Thomas Burger, tr., (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991). See Chapter One, especially his discussion of “oikos,” p.3-4, and the development of the market economy and “depersonalized state authority” in relation to the family unit and modernity, 19-20. 5 Take for example the terms gongyuan (公园 public park), gonggong qiche (公共汽车 public bus), or gongyong de (公用的 for public use) in modern Chinese. 6 Lin positions himself and his personal feelings for his wife as being constitutive of his feelings for the suffering of his countrymen, in the same way that the family remains a gong-public space constitutive of the nation. For example, he opens the letter by writing, “I love you dearly, and it is precisely because this love for you which gives me the courage to court death. Since the day we met, I have wished a happy ending for all lovers in this world. Yet in times such as ours, when the stench of blood sweeps the earth and dogs of death roam the streets, how many families can boast of happiness?...It is thus my love for you which urges me to help everyone in this world love their beloved; this is why I dare to die before you do, seemingly oblivious of your feelings. I hope you will understand my wishes, and in your grief will think of the people of this world. If you do so, you will surely be glad of the sacrifice of our individual happiness for the lasting happiness of all.” Lin Juemin 林觉民, “Lin Juemin: Last Letter to His Wife,” 林觉民：绝笔书, Eva Hung, tr., Renditions 41 & 42 (double issue, Spring and Autumn 1994), 162. 7 McDougall and Hansson, 6. Emphasis mine. 8 Habermas, 1. 9 Amy Dooling, Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth Century China, (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005). 10 Dooling, 4-5. 11 Dooling, 14.
33
12 Wang Lingzhen, Personal Matters: Women’s Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth-Century China, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 5. 13 Ibid. 14 See Wang Lingzhen’s discussion theorizing the personal in her book and the use this phrase in connection with contemporary Chinese writers, as well as its implications, 13-14. 15 Wang Lingzhen, 158. 16 Wang Lingzhen, 5. 17 Mayfair Mei-hui Yang ed., Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 5. 18 Referring again to the May Fourth myth that as a result of Confucianism, pre-modern women were completely illiterate and had no means to make their voices heard. While not many women had the means to write, the May Fourth intellectuals’ claim is certainly an overstatement. Many recent studies have focused on these writings, in the process calling the extent to which the May Fourth claim is valid. 19 Dooling, 14. This is not to suggest that there have not been “subversive female subjects” at all during the May Fourth period and after—Bing Xin’s writing, for example, often delves into similar areas as the contemporary female avant-gardists. However, in both the popular and critical imagination, the connection between women’s liberation and national salvation as put forth by Republican reformers and May Fourth intellectuals has dominated readings of women’s writing. 20 Maram Epstein, Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered Meanings in Late Imperial China, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center: Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2001), 8. 21 Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 6. 22 Lee, 8. 23 Meng Yue, “Female Images and National Myth,” in Gender Politics in Modern China, Tani E. Barlow ed., (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 126. 24 Meng, 127. 25 Through Chinese Women’s Eyes, VHS, directed by Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang (1997; New York, NY: Women Make Movies). 26 Yang, 11
34
27 Sang, quoting from Harriet Evans,180. 28 Sang, 27. 29 Wang Lingzhen, 155. 30 Wang Lingzhen, 155 31 Lee, 47.
35
CHAPTER II
WRITING THE PRIVATE BODY
“Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self.”
Cyril Connolly, "Miscellany: Last Words," in The New Statesman
Before is it possible to take a deeper look at the avant-garde female writers’
project of resistance, it is necessary to look first at what constitutes this space of literary
si-privacy and its relationship to the literary bodies that these writers narrate. To that
end, it is important to first understand self-writing and the many generic forms that it
takes. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson introduce the term “life writing,” and define the
term as, “A general term for writing of diverse kinds that takes a life as its subject.”1
Forms of life writing might include biography or works of fiction that follow the course
of one character’s life from birth to death, for example. It also includes what Smith and
Watson call life narrative, “Life narrative [i]s a somewhat narrower term that includes
many kinds of self-referential writing, including autobiography.”2 Life narrative
excludes biography and works of pure fiction, and shifts the focus from the writing of “a
life” to the writing of “one’s life.” As forms of self-referential writing, autobiography,
“individualized writing” (gerenhua xiezuo), “Notes from My Life” (wode rensheng biji),
and “private writing” all fall into this category. Moreover, it is important to note that
private writing” (私人化写作 sirenhua xiezuo) and “privacy literature” (隐私文学 yinsi
wenxue), while related, also refer to slightly different styles of writing within the “self-
writing” genre. It is in looking at the differences between these various forms of self-
writing that it is possible to understand the semi-autobiographical privacy fiction of the
36
female avant-garde writers. As Smith and Watson remind us, “Conventions that are
culturally and historically specific govern storytelling options, narrative plotting, and the
uses of remembering. And those conventions have histories: that is, at certain historical
moments and in specific milieux, certain stories become intelligible and normative.”3
Each of these generic forms has its own history, its own form, and its own set of cultural
implications. Moreover, as forms of self-writing, autobiography, “Notes on My Life,”
and “private writing” are related to each other and the boundaries which separate these
various generic forms are permeable and fluid. While it is beyond the scope of this study
to detail the development of individualized writing in Chinese literary history for
example, a brief comparative look at each of these different styles of writing the self
provides the foundation for looking at the semi-autobiographical privacy literature itself
in subsequent chapters.4
“Private Writing” and Autobiography
The self-referential fiction of the female avant-garde writers is most frequently
misread as autobiography, particularly their full-length novels which make frequent and
extensive use of personal details, and which are discussed in Chapters III, IV, AND V.
However, there are fundamental differences between the self-referential private writing
these authors create and the autobiographical form, differences that necessitate a different
reading and that are also fundamental to the female avant-garde writers’ project of
resistance. While autobiography is a very difficult genre of self-writing to define, it can
be thought of a specific kind of self-writing that is more focused in its approach to the
self than other related forms of self-writing such as the self-referential fiction of the
37
female avant-garde writers. In their work on the history and development of
autobiographical life writing, Smith and Watson tie the development of the Western
autobiographical tradition to the rise of liberal humanism during the Enlightenment.
While there had been forms of self-writing that predate this liberal humanist subject,
according to Smith and Watson, “’Autobiography,’ now the most commonly used term
for such life writing, thus described writing being produced at a particular historical
juncture, the early modern period in the West with its concept of the self-interested
individual intent on assessing the status of the soul or the meaning of public
achievement.”5 As Smith and Watson point out, this is the most commonly applied
definition of autobiography: a person of great achievement reflecting on the whole of
their life and past accomplishments. It is telling that this particular way of defining
autobiography links the individual and the public, either through their service to the
nation, or to their contributions to culture or society. However, as Smith and Watson also
note, it is a problematic way to define the genre because of the way that it limits who is
capable of writing an autobiography. Because of social conventions that gave them no
access to a public voice, or placed severe restrictions on the kinds of subject matter
deemed acceptable for them to write about, women and minorities were not able to write
what would have been considered an autobiography under this particular definition.
However, even when considering who could and could not write an autobiography, it is
important to note that even under this very limited definition, the genre of autobiography
served the purpose of linking the exceptional individual to the realm of the public. While
Smith and Watson are not specifically describing the development of autobiography in
China, which has its own long tradition, the same connection between an exceptional
38
man writing the story of his life of official service makes similar connections between the
individual and the gong-public realm.
Expanding the definition of autobiography, Marxist writer and theorist Antonio
Gramsci also offers a similar definition that ties the narrative form to the public. He
writes:
Autobiography can be conceived ‘politically.’ One knows that one’s life is similar to that of a thousand others, but through ‘chance’ it has had opportunities that the thousand others in reality could not or did not have. By narrating it, one creates this possibility, suggests the process, indicates the opening. Autobiography therefore replaces the ‘political’ or ‘philosophical essay:’ it describes in action what otherwise is deduced logically. Autobiography certainly has a great historical value in that it shows life in action and not just as written laws or dominant moral principles say it should be.6
Like the previous definition, Gramsci ties the narrative of the individual self to the
narrative of the collective and the narrative of history. For him, the autobiographical
form is a universalizing story in which the common man finds reflection in the image of
the extraordinary man. Moreover, Gramsci’s definition is more flexible, allowing
inclusive theoretical space for the autobiographies of women and minorities previously
excluded form the canon of autobiography because of their traditional lack of access to a
public persona. In these kinds of autobiographies, the individual’s story becomes
symbolic of the collective and as such is reminiscent of the feminist phrase, “the personal
is political.” People who traditionally had no access to the kind of public voice that
Smith and Watson describe in the Enlightenment autobiographical subject, or in the pre-
modern Chinese autobiographical subject, are able to write their personal narrative with
the understanding that the narration of the experiences and life story of the exceptional
individual are representative of the experiences of the collective. Many of the so-called
“scar” or “wound” narratives produced after Mao’s death in 1976 can be read into this
39
category, as can the memoirs of former Red Guards or sent-down youths published both
within and outside of China.7
Similarly, Wang Lingzhen points out the problems with the liberal humanist self-
narrated in autobiography and how it became increasingly politically destabilized:
The public/private distinction, central as it was for the assertion of individual liberty in the west, nevertheless acted as a powerful principle of exclusion. Through the identification of the private with the domestic, it played an undeniably important role in the subordination of women. Through redefining the political, feminists concluded that the supposedly separate worlds of private and public are actually interrelated, connected by a common patriarchal structure. The personal, therefore, had to be conceptualized within a politically constructed private domain, which liberalism had long claimed as nonpolitical.8
Both Gramsci and Wang point to the ways in which the traditional autobiographical form
gave a voice to certain individuals and denied that voice to others and attempt to provide
a new understanding of autobiography which links the personal narration of a single life
to the collective reading of a group, necessarily making autobiography into a public,
political form. It is precisely this public, political reading which the female avant-garde
writers are resisting in their fiction, and therefore, why their fiction at most should be
read as self-referential. For example, both Wang and John Ming Chen touch on this idea
in their respective discussions of one of the most important examples of contemporary
female autobiography in China, that of Yu Luojin. According to Wang:
Yu Luojin was among the most controversial of women—and of writers—in China in the early 1980s. Her brother’s posthumous fame as a national hero, her several published biographical and autobiographical works, and her unconventional record of marriages and divorces all contributed to her emergence at the center of numerous heated national debates. The topics of these debates ranged from the literary value of her writing to women’s rights of marriage and divorce; form the representation of history to whether her behavior was suitable for a Chinese woman.9
40
Like the avant-garde women writers, Yu faced similar kinds of public criticism for her
self-narration, however one of the most striking and important differences in that
criticism revolves around the political value of the narrative (women’s rights) and the
representation of history. When supporters of avant-garde women’s self-referential
fiction also read a political element into the female avant-garde writers’ novels, they are
doing so with the idea that these works are autobiographies. According to Chen,
women’s autobiographies are important because of their value in both giving subaltern
voices the ability to speak for themselves and because of the power that those voices have
to rewrite the patriarchal, orthodox narrative of history. As he says:
Now a historical ‘record’, now a highly personal account, now a political indictment, now a revelation of innermost feelings and thoughts, the autobiographical impulse produces works that are the genuine voices from the kitchen and the bedroom and of economic exploitation and sexual oppression therein; that invite the reader to political/sexual voyeurism; that tear to tatters any pretense to traditional and patriarchal sense of decency or propriety, moral or social.10
This way of looking at the autobiographical impulse is very similar to purpose that
Gramsci attributes to autobiography. Women’s autobiographies provide a counter-
narrative to the narrative of orthodox, patriarchal history by giving a voice to those who
previously had no voice within this system. As Chen suggests, and as we can imagine
that Gramsci would agree, when one woman narrates her autobiography as a counter-
discourse to history, she opens up a space for the stories of countless other women like
her whose common experiences are reflected in the narration of the individual. In doing
so, the narration of the extraordinary individual’s life story is necessarily linked to both
the collective and the histori-political. Her story becomes representative of the collective
41
experiences of women who live(d) in the same time, culture, class, etc. Again, turning to
Yu’s autobiography as an example, Chen illustrates this point, saying:
Yu’s chosen autobiographical form calls into question conventional Chinese—and predominantly male at that time—ways of writing autobiography. The intensely personal quality of her-story challenges the then prevalent mode of autobiography as a mere reflection of collective or national history, with the glorification of the Party as the socialist teleology as the sine qua non….No official records or history can replace her own version of truth. Indeed, her autobiography seriously challenges the existing history of the Party, written in a single-voiced, often authoritarian manner that admits no other contentious voices or differing interpretations.11
Yu’s autobiography is clearly linked to a political and historical reading, which gives her
autobiographical impulse a necessarily public intent. The works of the avant-garde
women writers, however, avoid making links to larger political and historical narratives.
While moments from history may appear from time to time in their fiction, their self-
referential fiction is neither oriented towards, nor framed by the same publicly-oriented
concerns that motivate Yu’s autobiography, and autobiography in general. As such,
while they do share a similar underlying autobiographical impulse, are not works of
autobiography per se.
In order to better understand why the works of the avant-garde women writers are
not autobiographies like that of Yu Luojin, Nancy H. Miller poses helpful questions
about the role of gender and the possibility of implied universality within the
autobiographical narrative are helpful. She says:
The doxa of gender identity has indeed meant that women writers have had to wrestle with a series of powerful prohibitions: about the legitimacy of picking up the pen; about revealing their sexuality; about claiming exceptionality; about the desire for public fame. The biography of gender lays down a grid against which the autobiographer necessarily strains. The constraints of these ideological restrictions have shaped both patters of self-expression and the reception of texts.12
42
The social rules which have prevented women from writing so-called canonical
autobiographies, rules predicated on when women can write and what is permissible for
women to write about, become the very means by which a woman’s individual story is
discredited. If she writes candidly about her sexual history, as Yu Luojin does, she opens
herself to criticism and dismissal as a “bad woman.” Moreover, while there are aspects
to her story that invite mass identification, for example the suffering of one woman
during the Mao era as representative of the suffering of all women during the Mao era,
these kinds of universal readings also synecdochically negate the individual woman’s
voice and make her instead a metaphor all women’s voices. This impulse on the part of
the audience to take a metaphorical or allegorical reading, the very reading that the avant-
garde women writers are struggling against, will be taken up more in the following
chapter.
However, this still leaves the question of what constitutes an autobiography
unresolved. In his definition of autobiography, French theorist Philippe Lejeune
discusses the “autobiographical pact” between writer and reader as being a major
component of what makes a work autobiographical. He writes,
It is thus in relation to the proper name that we are able to situate the problems of autobiography….The entire existence of the person we call the author is summed up by this name: the only mark in the text of an unquestionable world-beyond-the-text, referring to a real person, which requires that we thus attribute to him, in the final analysis, the responsibility for the production of the whole written text….But the place assigned to this name is essential: it is linked, by a social convention, to the pledge of responsibility of a real person.13
For Lejeune, in order to be considered an autobiography, and not an autobiographical
novel, a work must have the autobiographical pact, and in labeling a work as such both
the author and the reader are entering into a kind of social contract where author agrees
43
that the self being narrated within the pages of the text is the same as the name of the
cover page, as he says:
The autobiographical pact is the affirmation in the text of this identity, referring back in the final analysis to the name of the author on the cover. The autobiographical pact comes in diverse forms; but all of them demonstrate their intention to honor his/her signature.14
This seems a very simple method of identifying an autobiography, and as Paul de Man
points out, one which turns the autobiography into a social work rather than an individual
narrative, as he says, “While modifying that concept of the pact to account for the
fictionality of the proper name, however, Lejeune reconfirms the necessity of an author-
reader pact as a starting point for both the writer and reader.”15 In the presentation of an
autobiographical self, the author agrees that the self he or she presents is identifiable to
the reader as the author, and the reader in turn agrees to understand the protagonist
narrated in the text as the author. While Lejeune also goes on to make other claims about
who can and cannot write an autobiography; his fundamental definition revolves around
this pact. And while simply looking at the autobiographical pact does not necessarily
inherently invite larger political or historical readings, it does necessarily make the
autobiography into a social act rather than an individual one, and as such, also links the
form to the realm of the public. And once again, when we turn to the works of the female
avant-garde writers, we find that this pact is also missing; an idea which will be discussed
later in this chapter. Suffice it to say, that even when we look at autobiography from a
number of different angles, using various definitions from various points in the
development of the genre, there is a necessary connection between autobiography and
publicness; a linking of the individual with the larger forces of society, history, and/or the
nation. Because their project is one of privacy and the reclamation of the female body
44
back from its connections with history and nation, it is possible to see how it is a
misnomer to call these works autobiographies.
Much of this mislabeling springs from the fact that autobiography itself is a
difficult generic form to define, as Paul de Man discusses:
Empirically, as well as theoretically, autobiography lends itself poorly to generic definition; each specific instance seems to be an exception to the norm; the works themselves always seem to shade off into neighboring or even incompatible genres and, perhaps most revealing of all, generic discussions, which can have such powerful heuristic value in the case of tragedy or of the novel, remain distressingly sterile when autobiography is at stake.16
Indeed, much time and effort has been spent in the field of autobiography studies on
trying to determine exactly what form a narrative must take in order to be considered an
autobiography, of which the preceding definitions are just a few. Like Lejeune, de Man
also suggests that the key to reading autobiography is in the mutual recognition and
agreement between author and reader that the life being narrated or read is the same life
as the author’s; however, de Man critiques Lejeune’s insistence that it is the
autobiographical pact alone which makes a work of self-narrative into an autobiography.
de Man writes:
From specular figure of the author, the reader becomes the judge, the policing power in charge of verifying the authenticity of the signature and the consistency of the signers behavior, the extent to which he respects or fails to honor the contractual agreement he has signed.17
This critique is particularly relevant to the works of the avant-garde women writers. Both
Lejeune and de Man suggest that there must be some mutual understanding between
author and reader to make an autobiographical reading possible, however, in the case of
the female avant-garde writers this mutual agreement is missing. While their use of self-
referential details may tempt the reader to understand the work as one of autobiographical
45
self-narration, their insistence on the creation of a private, inaccessible space in their
fiction negates any possibility of mutual understanding and forces their works into the
realm of the si-private. Moreover, as de Man points out, if that mutual agreement is
“contractually” expected by the reader, it gives them the power to police the self that is
being narrated in the work, to judge whether it is acceptable, valid, or valuable in any one
of a myriad of socially and culturally determined ways. By using alternative forms of
female sexuality and culturally unreadable female bodies as narrative techniques, the
female avant-garde writers deny the reader this power of judgment. This denial is
fundamental to their project of resistance, and as such, one of the most compelling
reasons against reading their works of self-referential fiction as autobiographies.
Another compelling reason lies in what de Man describes as the purpose, and the
danger of autobiography. de Man suggests that rather than try to define autobiography in
terms of form, it is more productive to talk about the function of autobiography, which he
suggests is prosopopetic. Prosopopeia is the narrative act of giving a speaker who is
absent or imagined a voice; as de Man says, “Prosopopeia is the trope of autobiography,
by which one’s name…is made as intelligible and memorable as a face. Our topic deals
with the giving and taking away of faces, with face and deface, figure, figuration, and
disfiguration.”18 It is particularly telling that de Man links the autobiographical narrative
act with the giving of not just a voice but a face or figure precisely because it is in the
narrating of selves, or bodies, which resist the cultural definitions of woman that make
these works ones of resistance. de Man is also sensitive to the problems that come not
only with the use of language to give voice to a self, but also with the inherent risk of
prosopopeia. He writes:
46
To the extent that language is figure (or metaphor, or prosopopeia) it is indeed not the thing itself but the representation, the picture of the thing and, as such, it is silent, mute as pictures are mute. Language, as trope, is always privative….To the extent that, in writing, we are dependent on this language we all are…not silent, which implies the possible manifestation of sound at out own will, but silent as a picture, that is to say eternally deprived of voice and condemned to muteness….[A]utobiography (the prosopopeia of the voice and the name) deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores.19
By insisting on reading the female bodies in these self-referential works as
autobiographical, and therefore public and “speaking” on behalf of the subaltern Other
that is “woman,” (prosopopeia) the actual woman’s voice is silenced. The story a woman
narrates in her autobiography by necessity invites comparisons between her body and all
other female bodies, as Gramsci suggests, as well as offers the reader the power of
judgment over the veracity and validity of her experiences, as Lejeune and de Man note.
An autobiographical reading, through the prosopopetic act, tries to make private, personal
experience accessible to the public via language which by necessity turns both the
experience and the self (body) that experienced it into metaphor and therefore mutes the
original voice. Taken together, these reasons highlight why a strictly autobiographical
reading does not work for the self-referential fiction of the female avant-garde writers,
whose goal is to rescue their voices and forms from the realm of metaphor.
However, the intention towards self narrative that is a part of the autobiographical
act is not entirely absent from these works of self-referential fiction. The goal of the
avant-garde women’s self-referential fiction is two-fold: first, to resist the metaphoric
reading of their bodies as somehow representative of all women’s experiences and
reclaim their voices and forms, and second, to create a space in their fiction that exists
just for them, a si-private space where they can exist as individuals. In order to create
this space as one of both resistance and existence, the female avant-garde writers use
47
details from their own lives, in varying degrees of opacity, which allows them to narrate a
complete female self whose body and voice belong solely to herself. Not only is this
female self only partly accessible to the reading public, which will be discussed in the
next chapter, but the motivation for the creation of this self can still be described as an act
of self-creation, even if the work as a whole is not intended as an autobiography. As
Smith and Watson point out:
What had been assumed by earlier generations of critics to be a universal ‘self’—achieving self-discovery, self-creation, and self-knowledge—became, in the wake of multiple theoretical challenges of the first half of the century, a ‘subject’ driven by self-estrangement and self-fragmentation. Moreover, the relationship of language to what it claims to represent becomes problematic. Any simplistic notion that writers could ‘intend’ what they say is undermined. As a result, the project of self-representation could no longer be read as direct access to the truth of the self. The truth of autobiographical acts had to be understood differently as an always inaccessible knowledge.20
Like the writers of autobiographies, these avant-garde writers also desire to tell the story
of themselves as individuals; although their motivations, and therefore the form of their
self-writing, are different, both engage in the act of self-creation in order to reach that
goal. The female avant-garde writers, freed from the social and political constraints of
morality and metaphor, attempt to narrate a self in their fiction whose whole truth is
ultimately only completely knowable to themselves and in doing so create in the fiction a
space of si-privacy. As such, the privacy fiction of these authors is best thought of as
self-referential rather than autobiographical.
“Private Writing” and “Individualized Writing”
In addition to autobiography, the fiction of the female avant-garde writers is also
often termed “individualized writing” as well. And like autobiography, this term is not
48
entirely accurate to describe the three self-referential novels which will be discussed in
later chapters, although it should be pointed out that it is very possible to read a lot of
their other fiction, particularly that of Xu Kun, under this rubric. And while there are
clear linkages between the self-referential private writing of the female avant-garde
writers and the self-referential fiction of their male counterparts, as well as connections to
women’s autobiographical writing and memoirs, it is also clear that in focusing on the
creation of a space of si-privacy at the same time that they are writing the self in their
fiction, that the female avant-garde writers are engaged in a project of resistance to the
male/heterosexual/state appropriated image of woman. This can even be seen in the
terminology used to describe the different kinds of generic forms of self-writing:
“individualized writing” versus “private writing.” While “individualized writing” refers
to the self or the individual (geren), it also traces its lineage as a term to the May Fourth
writers and their project of nation building. As Janet Ng writes:
The notion or the invention of the geren (the individual) is complicit with nationalism. Just as the assertion of the linguistic/epistemological category of the individual is a political and social act, autobiography must be seen as a part of this political and social program. The new modern autobiographical form [which found its genesis during the May Fourth Movement], then, is a method of discursive management of contemporary political and social ideology.21
“Private writing,” on the other hand, by its very nature draws attention to the opaque and
inconsumable nature of the self being presented in highlighting the si-private aspects of
that literature—the “obstructed access” which has previously been discussed as a key
element of the term si.22 It is for these reasons that the works of the female avant-garde
writers should be understood as works of resistance which exist in the borderland
between “public” and “private,” as well as works of rearticulation, in turning the usually
negatively-associated concept of si-privacy into a positive tool for writing the self. While
49
they are not specifically referring to the differences between individualized writing and
private writing, Smith and Watson also raise the issue of the connection between the
individual and history saying, “Life narratives, depending on the memory they construct,
are records of acts of interpretation by subjects inescapably in historical time, and in their
relation to their own ever-moving pasts.”23 When we consider the individualized fiction
of the male avant-garde writers, works such as To Live (Huozhe) by Yu Hua and Red
Sorghum (Hong gaoliang jiazu) by Mo Yan, this is exactly what we find: the articulation
of an individual faced with the forces of history and nation. Yu Hua himself remarks on
this when he writes:
I write because I cannot give up writing at all. Writing has become an integral part of my life, since I began writing some fifteen years ago. I know that writing can chance a person turning a strong-willed, resolute person into a tearful, wavering type, a real lively person into a writer. I don’t mean to devalue writing. On the contrary, I want to stress the importance of writing for individuals, because the ultimate power of literature is to soften one’s heart, and to make people who love literature love each other, after they have been separated by thousands of miles and experienced life and death.24
Yu Hua sees his writing as a means not only to express himself and his individual
memories and experiences, but also as a way to connect with other individuals across
space and time. And while Yu Hua’s fiction, like that of the other male avant-garde
writers, does not have the overtly political intention of “scar literature,” his main focus is
placing the individual in relationship to history, society, and the nation, thus giving it an
inherently public-facing purpose.
Moreover, Yu Hua and many of the other male avant-garde writers have been
heavily influenced by Fredric Jameson (amongst other Western critics and theorists),
whose work on “third-world” literature and capitalism has been both widely read and
widely criticized.25 One of Jameson’s main arguments is that all “third-world” literature,
50
in this case, literature written in developing countries, is necessarily to be understood as a
kind of national allegory, where the individual’s fate stands for that of the nation.
Certainly, there is much about May Fourth literature, for example, that invites this kind of
reading, as there is about the fiction written by the male avant-garde writers in the 1980s.
As Jameson argues:
All third-world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories, even when, or perhaps I should say, particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel. Let me try to state the distinction in a grossly oversimplified way: one of the determinants of capitalist culture, that is, the culture of the western realist and modernist novel, is a radical split between the private and the public, between the poetic and the political, between what we have come to think of as the domain of sexuality and the unconscious and that of the public world of classes, of the economic, and of secular political power: in other words, Freud versus Marx.26
While Jameson’s argument that all narratives written in developing countries not only
make the individual a metaphor for the nation, it is useful to help us understand the
difference between the male and female avant-garde writers; between individualized
writing and private writing. Just as Jameson draws a clear distinction between “the
private and the public, the poetic and the political,” and between the imagined or
unconscious world of dreams which exists at the level of the self and the real world of
individual experience which can be shared by many selves, so too do the male avant-
garde writers. I am not arguing that the literature of the male avant-garde writers should
be read as allegory per se, but that because of the connections between the May Fourth
individual that Janet Ng points out, as well as the publicly-oriented focus that the male
avant-garde writers maintain, there is an fundamental difference between the male avant-
garde writers and the female avant-garde writers.
51
The fiction of the female avant-garde writers does not fit easily into the simple
dichotomy that Jameson presents. Their fiction blurs the boundaries between public and
private, between political and poetic, between Freud and Marx, and as such must be
considered as a different kind of writing that the individualized writing of the male avant-
garde writers. For example, both Yu Hua and Lin Bai talk about the role that memory
plays in their writing. According to Yu Hua:
Such is the way of life: experience is always more vivid and powerful than memory. Memory appears when the past disappears, like a straw floating above the water for the drowning person. Self-salvation is merely symbolic…My experience is that writing continuously awakens memories. I believe that such memories do not just belong to me but are images of an era, or imprints of the world in the depths of one’s mind—indelible scars. My writing awakens in the memory numerous desires that appeared in my past life or that never appeared, that were fulfilled or were never fulfilled. My writing puts them together and makes them legitimate in imaginary reality. Ten years later I have discovered that my writing has taken on a life of its own. Simultaneously, my writing and my real life move forward. Sometimes they crisscross each other, and sometimes they are widely apart. Hence I tend to believe that writing is beneficial to the health of one’s mind and body, because I feel that my life is gradually becoming complete. Writing allows me to possess two lives, one real and the other imaginary. Their relationship resembles health and sickness. When one becomes stronger, the other inevitably deteriorates. Consequently, as my real life becomes more and more impoverished, my imaginary life becomes extraordinarily rich.27
For Yu Hua, his writing becomes the means by which he connects his own personal
memories and experiences with the memories and experiences of a whole group of
people or of a particular period of time. While this is not the national allegory that
Jameson describes, it is one of the representative characteristics of individualized
writing—the connection between the individual and the group and between individual
memory and experience and national history and culture. Yu Hua’s To Live and Mo
Yan’s Red Sorghum are perfect examples of the public orientation of individualized
writing. On the other hand, for Lin Bai:
52
For me, individualized writing (gerenhua xiezuo) is built upon the basis of personal experience and personal memory. Through individualized writing, we release from repressed memory those personal experiences which have been regarded by the collective narrative as taboos. I watch these personal experiences soar: they appear marginal and strange in the collective discourse of the nation, the state, and politics. It is this strangeness that has established the uniqueness of the personal experiences. As a woman writer (nüxing xiezuozhe), I face a double oppression--the mainstream narrative and male narrative (sometimes these two overlap). The double oppression can easily destroy an individual like me. I am trying to resist such oppression and destruction...by my own individualized writing.28
Although Lin also uses the term “individualized writing,” what she is describing here is
very different from the writing that Yu Hua describes. Rather than Yu Hua’s “images of
an era,” Lin Bai’s memories (and by extension her writing) do not fit so easily with the
“collective discourse of the nation.” They become the means by which she is able to
resist the collective discourse; as she says, by articulating those parts of the self which
had previously been labeled taboo she is able to create a space in her fiction where her
individual experiences can exist apart from the nation or society. While Lin has
remarked in interviews that she avoids using the term si in relationship with her own
writing because of the negative connotations of the term, it is also clear from the way that
she describes her own “individualized writing” that the purpose of her fiction is to create
a private space for self-articulation. As such, like the fiction of the other female avant-
garde writers, this kind of writing is better termed privacy writing in order to separate is
inward-looking focus from the publicly-oriented individualized writing of many of the
male avant-garde writers.
Conclusion
Having looked at both the differences between autobiography and individualized
writing and the self-referential fiction, it is much easier to say what this fiction is not;
53
however, this still leaves unresolved the question of what this fiction is. As noted in the
introduction, and as de Man draws our attention to when he raises the problem of generic
definition, any definition of what this fiction is necessarily limits it by including some
works and excluding others. Rather, it is in what private writing offers as potential that is
important here—the motivation of the female authors who create it and the means by
which they do so—that becomes the method for distinguishing it from other forms of
self-writing. As previously mentioned, there are two main strategies that the female
avant-garde writers use to create a space in their fiction for articulations of a female self
that resists a metaphoric reading: the frequent use of details from their own lives in their
fiction, and depictions of alternative forms of female sexuality beyond that of the
heteronormative wife and mother. These strategies allow the female avant-garde writers
to create this private space in their fiction because it allows them to resist a larger
political or historical reading, as well as the social forces which have shaped the publicly
accepted image of “woman.”
As such, I suggest that we consider the concept of ostranenie, or “estrangement,”
and the possibilities that it offers as a means to understanding how the self-referential
fiction allows the female avant-garde writers to create a private space of self in their
novels. Developed as a concept by the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky, ostranenie
refers to those times in art or poetry when the artist takes an image that is commonplace
and puts it in a new context or uses it in a new way in order to reinvest it with meaning.
Looking to the future and concerned about the automatization and anaesthetization of
life, Shklovsky argues that it is the purpose of art not merely to represent, but to allow us
to see. As he explains, when we get used to seeing certain images in certain contexts
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they are only being represented, or in the case of the female avant-garde writers, being
read as metaphoric, and we therefore become anaesthetized to them. In order to actually
see that image, it is necessary to estrange it from its usual context. As he says:
A writer reveals life to his reader in a way that enables the latter to examine it better. He shows his reader what the latter sometimes cannot see. Art sharpens the perceptions of life, disclosing and renewing its contradictions, restoring differences in what no longer is differentiated….In order to cognize the connection of things anew, it is sometimes necessary to destroy the connections that existed before. When a protagonist, being perplexed, talks about ordinary things but is amazed at them as at something absurd, we have the introduction of a new way of seeing. This takes place when a writer wants to destroy the coherence of a world outlook that has become alien to him.29
In the case of the female avant-garde writers, we can understand the act of estrangement
as being the destruction of the metaphoric female body on both the individual and
collective level so that the individual female voice can be expressed, that is, “restoring
differences in what no longer is differentiated.” Moreover, the destruction of
representation that Shklovsky describes here does not mean that the original image ceases
to exist, but that the reader or viewer’s automatic response to its representation is
disrupted, thereby breathing new life into the original image, as Alexei Bogdanov
explains:
The forms that are being destroyed in the life-affirming process of ostranenie do not actually die; they continue to live in the “automatized” realm of ordinary, non-poetic utterances and thus retain the surplus of signification (acquired of the period of their existence) that allows their further reincarnations or resurrections in various dialogic contexts of poetic discourse.30
When the female avant-garde writers estrange the female form from the meanings it has
been given as an appropriated body, those metaphoric connections which are necessarily
tied to the nation and thereby the public, do not cease to exist. Rather for them this
estrangement of the female form from its representation as heterosexual wife and mother,
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is both in the narration of female selves who desire outside the boundaries of social
convention and what allows for the reappropriation of that self, that is, the creation of a
literary space of si-privacy. In the process of estranging the female body from its
representations, the female avant-garde writers allow the reader to differentiate individual
female voices rather than “woman;” however, because they have estranged the individual
voice, they also are able to limit the extent to which the reader is able to interact with that
voice, thereby creating for themselves a space of si-privacy. Additionally, drawing on
Shklovsky’s and explanation of ostranenie, the “new way of seeing” allows us to
understand how the estrange the concept of si-privacy from its traditionally negative
associations and invest it with new, positive meaning—that of a space for the articulation
of self.
However, it is also because of this estrangement that it is very difficult to pin
down a precise definition of privacy literature, because it necessarily takes slightly
different forms for each individual author. Bogdanov points out that, “In the most
common cases of ostranenie, the object still remains recognizable, but it undergoes a
transition on the plane of representation and signification that involves a revelatory
participation of the other (reader) who experiences this shift [sdvig] as in instance of
Being-as-event (in Bakhtin’s terms) or as vision (in Shlovsky’s terms).” 31 This
particular description of estrangement is more easily applied to the novels of Xu Kun, for
example, whose work represents one end of a spectrum of the “making strange” of the
female body, and whose work will be considered in Chapter V. Bogdanov goes on to say
that, “The most radical manifestations of ostranenie, such as ‘zaum’ and non-objective
art, give us verbal and visual forms that are totally unidentifiable. The apophatic
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response ‘not this, not that’ to such forms not only comes naturally to the reader, viewer,
critic, or the artist himself, but also opens itself to a mystical interpretation.”32 In the
same way that we can think of Xu Kun’s works as representing one end of a spectrum, at
the other end finds Can Xue, who has been called the “Chinese Kafka,” and whose work
is often so strange as to be almost incomprehensible. In between Xu Kun and Can Xue
are Lin Bai and Hai Nan, whose work ranges from the transparent to the opaque, and who
are the subjects of Chapters IV AND V.
There is one other form of life writing which has bearing on this study, that of the
“Notes From My Life” (Wode rensheng biji). Not quite an autobiography, because it
does not contain enough of a coherent narrative of self, and yet more than a collection of
essays or belles lettres because the self occupies the primary subject position, this
Chinese genre of writing is perhaps best described as what Michel Beaujour describes as
the literary self-portrait, “Self-portraiture is not self-description but ‘the mirror whose
reflecting function is mimicked in the symmetrical statement: me by me.”33 Zhang
Ailing, in her own collection of sketches called Written on Water (Liu yan), hints at some
of the generic tension present in the “Notes” form when she writes:
Still, the kind of familiar writing that’s full of “me me me” from start to finish ought to be taken to task. I recently came across a couple of lines in an English book that might serve as a rather fitting jibe at authors excessively interested in themselves: “They not only spend a lifetime gazing at their own navels but also go in search of other people who might be interested in gazing along with them.” Unsure as to whether what follows constitutes a navel exhibition, I have chosen to write it all the same.34
As Andrew Jones, translator of Written on Water explains in his introduction, “The essay
form became a means for Eileen Chang constantly to redefine the boundaries between
life and work, the domestic and the historic, and meticulously weave a rich private life
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together with the concerns of a public intellectual.”35 Jones’ description of Zhang’s
collection might be the best way to understand what exactly what the “Notes From My
Life” genre is, and why it is both different from autobiography (and memoir) as well as
from the self-referential fiction of the female avant-garde writers. Like autobiography,
“Notes” take an individual self as their main subject, however, not all of the essays in the
collection that forms a “Notes” work are focused on the self, rather they may cover the
author’s point of view on larger social, political, or historical issues, as Zhang Ailing
does in her essay, “A Chronicle of Changing Clothes,” or describe the author’s
surroundings and sensory experiences at a particular point in time, as in Zhang’s essay,
“Notes on Apartment Life.” These essays all either narrate memories and experiences of
the author, or narrate the author’s point of view and so in that sense come together to
create a portrait of the author, but not necessarily of the author’s life and so is necessarily
different from autobiography. Similarly, the “Notes” genre, like the self-referential
fiction of the female avant-garde writers, demonstrates the author’s impulse toward self-
creation, and like the avant-garde writers’ self-referential fiction, is often a site of
resistance. As Jones says of Zhang’s work, “The narrative voice is neither the passive
receiver of a system of established social customs, values, and stereotypes of femininity
nor a spokesperson for the ‘progressive’ nationalist ideological agenda of the May Fourth
era.”36 However, unlike the self-referential fiction of the female avant-garde writers, the
“Notes” genre still retains more connections to a public persona, often providing the
author a space to critique contemporary social phenomena, and in doing so resist them, or
to trace the development of their own work. For example, as I will discuss in Chapter V,
Xu Kun’s “Notes” often have a far more overtly feminist tone that does her self-
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referential fiction. Similar to what Jones has pointed out about Written on Water, the
three authors’ “Notes” lack the same end-goal of creating a private space of self as their
fiction does. Rather, they blend aspects of the private and the public together. As such,
the concept of the literary self-portrait is the most fitting way to understand “Notes” as a
genre, and how it is distinct from other forms of self-referential writing.
This distinction is key, because in those differences lies the key to exploring the
self-referential private writing of the female avant-garde writers; it becomes a question of
understanding the estranged self that is narrated in their fiction as juxtaposed with the
represented self that they narrate in their “Notes,” for as Smith and Watson remind us:
[T]he self is a fiction, an illusion constituted in discourse, a hypothetical place or space of storytelling. A true self can never be discovered, unmasked or revealed because at its core is a mise en abîme, an infinite regress. The origin and history of the self, then, are fictions, although the history of utterances of that fiction can be traced. Because the self is split and fragmented, it can no longer be conceptualized as unitary. At a given moment what calls itself the self is different from itself at any other given moment. As Virginia Woolf remarked, “‘I’ is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being.”37
Reading these two different articulations of self alongside each other not only allows us
to avoid the pitfalls of needing one definition that can contain all forms of women’s
private writing, as well as understand how each author uses the narrative strategies
outlined in this chapter in their writing, ultimately driven by the same goal of
rearticulation and reappropriation. Moreover, when taken together, these two genres
might be said to make up the “split self” of life narrative. Therefore it is with this
understanding in mind that I turn to each of the three authors in question in this study and
look more closely at their fiction and their memoirs, their narrative strategies and their
use of estrangement, the types of private selves that they narrate and the kind of literary
bodies that they present.
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1Notes 1 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 2001. 2. 2 Smith and Watson, 2. 3 Smith and Watson, 71. 4 There have been many works published which cover aspects of self-writing in China in greater depth, particularly Wang Lingzhen’s Personal Matters: Women’s Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth-Century China and Janet Ng’s The Experience of Modernity: Chinese Autobiography in the Early Twentieth Century. See bibliography for full citation. 5 Smith and Watson, 2. 6 Gramsci, Antonio. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith ed. William Boelhwer, tr., Selections from Cultural Writings, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 132. 7 Although not all of these works would be considered complete autobiographies, wound narratives such as, The Good Women of China, and memoirs such as Wild Swans and Spider Eaters are representative of this kind of narrative. For a more detailed investigation, see Wang Lingzhen’s, Personal Matters: Women’s Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth-Century China. 8 Wang Lingzhen, 14. 9 Wang Lingzhen, 140 10 John (Zhong) Ming Chen, “Women’s Autobiography As Counter-Discourse: The Cases of Dorothy Livesay and Yu Loujin,” in Huihua Chen and Whitney Crothers Dilley ed., Feminism/Femininity in Chinese Literature, (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2002), 39. 11 John Ming Chen, 36 12 Nancy Miller, “Representing Others: Gender and the Subjects of Autobiography,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6 no.1 (1991), 17. 13 Philippe Lejeune, Paul John Eakin ed. Katherine Leary tr., On Autobiography, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 11. 14 Lejeune, 14.
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15 Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-facement.” MLN 94 No. 5 (December 1979), 919-930. Quote, 923. 16 de Man, 920. 17 de Man, 923. 18 de Man, 926. 19 de Man, 930. 20 Smith and Watson, 124. 21 Janet Ng, The Experience of Modernity: Chinese Autobiography if the Early Twentieth Century, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 16.
22See Introduction for Bonnie McDougall’s definition of si. 23 Smith and Watson, 24. 24 Liu Kang, “The Short-Lived Avant-Garde,” MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 63 no. 1 (March 2002), 95. Quoting from Yu Hua and Shaoyun Huan, “Eight Questions for Yu Hua,” (Ba wen Yu Hua) Love (Nü you: female friends) 7 (1999): 10. 25 Liu Kang, 99-100. 26 Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (Autumn, 1986), 69. 27 Liu Kang, 92. Quoting from Yu Hua, Collected Fiction of Yu Hua: World Like Mist (Yu Hua xiaoshuo: Shishi ruyan) (Beijing: Xin shijie chubanshe, 1999), 3. 28 Lin Bai, “Jiyi yu gerenhua xiezuo” (记忆与个人化写作 Memory and individualized writing), Huacheng (Flower city) 5 (1996): 125. In Zhang Jingyuan, “Breaking Open: Chinese Women’s Writing in the Late 1980s and 1990s.” In Pang-yuan Chi and David Der-wei Wang, Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century: A Critical Survey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. 161-179. Quote, 172. 29 Peter Rossbacher, “Shklovsky’s Concept of Ostranenie and Aristotle’s Admiratio,” MLN 92 no. 5 (December 1977), 1040. 30 Alexei Bogdanov, “Ostranenie, Kenosis, and Dialogue: The Metaphysics of Formalism According to Shklovsky,” The Slavic and East European Journal 49 no. 1 (Spring, 2005), 53. 31 Bogdanov, 51-52. 32 Bogdanov, 55.
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33 Smith and Watson, quoting from Michel Beaujour, 138-139 34 Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing), Written on Water, Andrew Jones tr., (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 2. 35 Andrew Jones in Chang, xii 36 Jones in Chang, xviii. 37 Smith and Watson, on Lacan and Derrida, 132-133.
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CHAPTER III
THE PUBLIC-ATION OF THE PRIVATE BODY
“An author is not a person. He is a person who writes and publishes.” -Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography
To look at the following authors through the lens of si-privacy begs the question
of what it means when these authors publish, or make public, their private bodies and
private selves. As Wang Lingzhen asks, “[H]ow are we to read or hear voices that,
despite their active engagement with the commercial mode of representation, also refuse
to be completely consumed and appropriated by market forces in contemporary China,
thereby conveying different messages?”1 In order to answer this question, it is necessary
first to understand the tension and interplay between what these writers hope to
accomplish in their writing and how these works have been understood by critics and the
reading public alike. I argue that by accompanying discussions of female sexuality with
discussions of the self and si it is possible to provide an alternate reading of the works of
avant-garde women writers which neither essentializes female behavior and sexuality,
nor criticizes it as being titillating or vulgar, while also highlighting the inherent
contradictions that come with the making public (publishing) of these private discourses.
This public-ation of the private is therefore central to the avant-garde women writers’
project of resistance.
The making public of a woman’s literary body in order to imbue it with meaning
is not unique to the avant-garde women writers. Joan Judge shows how various
politically motivated groups have appropriated the biographies of “virtuous women” in
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an attempt to show what a woman should be, as the symbolic potential for what the
Chinese nation could be.2 She seeks to complicate, as she puts it, “elucidate,”3
understandings of the period by presenting, “a range of the often hybrid materials
simultaneously available to a single turn-of-the-twentieth century reader,”4 and then
working through these various presentations, appropriations and meanings of the female
exemplar. She shows convincingly how the actual situation of the time was far more
complex than the usual reform-minded, eventually iconoclastic, readings of the late Qing
and Republican periods, especially with regard to the “woman question.”
In order to do this she has devised a schema to help sort through the many varied
and often competing discourses of the time. This is especially useful as many of these
discourses advocate the same goal though they hope to reach it through different means.
Her schema is made up three vertical distributions, which she identifies as the processes
of modernity; and four horizontal categories ranging from progressive reformers to
conservative traditionalists, which group the various voices of the period under a larger
hermeneutic umbrella. She then works her way through three major kinds of female
exemplar—the virtuous woman, the talented woman, and the heroic woman—laying the
grid she has created out on top of these “biographies of worthy women,” and showing
how these images served both the aims of the group appropriating them, as well as the
processes of modernity. In other words, she shows how the various groups each used the
biographies of worthy women to advocate their positions regarding both the “woman
question” and the “China question” (i.e. how to make China strong again), and how these
various appropriations overlapped or were at odds with each other as well as how the
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various groups were often advocating the same end point—national strengthening and
modernization.
Judge raises several points that are of particular interest here. The first of these is
her discussion of female students and sexuality. As she writes:
Critics blamed female education for not only producing social ambiguities between reputable and disreputable women, but for creating gender and sexual ambiguities. They disparaged the masculine appearance of many female students….Opponents of female education also believed that new schools promoted perverse intimate relations between women. Female same-sex love was first identified as a social issue at precisely the time formal female education became a controversial political issue. It remained intricately linked to the figure of the female student and the milieu of women’s schools from the turn of the twentieth century through the Republican period. The ostensible site of “unorthodox” erotic practices between various permutations of female students and teachers, girls’ schools were identified as a threat not only to the long-standing gender order but to the existing economic and reproductive order.5
While the discussion over what constituted a “good” woman was certainly not a new one,
Judge shows how the opening of public spaces for female education complicated this
debate, as well as opening a space for reformers who resisted the appropriation of the
female body by the nationalist cause with what could be argued is a proto-radical-
feminist rhetoric.
Secondly, Judge shows how no matter which group (and by association, set of
goals) she focuses on, there are certain kinds of women who remain socially
unacceptable. By and large, this seems to be the result of the woman’s overly private
motivations—whether they are in service of private sexual desire, the preservation of
their own virtue, or even in the service of the family at the exclusion of the nation. For
example she writes:
Chaste women were figures of public controversy because of their intensely private actions: taking up residence in their dead fiancés homes; cutting off hair, ears, and noses in the inner chambers; or hanging themselves from the rafters of
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the women’s quarters. At the opposite pole of the regime of feminine virtue were women who provoked debate not because of their private devotion to the principles of female virtue but because of their alleged public flaunting on those very principles.6
While discussions of privacy (and alternative female sexuality) are not a part of the
project of her book, it is informative that issues of appropriation of the female image and
the female voice are wrapped up with issues of privacy and the self.
Tani Barlow also takes up the question of women, women’s bodies, and meaning,
albeit from a more historical-linguistic perspective, in her work, The Question of Women
in Chinese Feminism. Like Judge, she seeks to understand how to “read” women; in
Barlow’s case it is by understanding how various terms for women in Chinese were
deployed and the relationship between those terms and the corresponding arguments
being made about female selfhood. She traces the development of these terms from the
late Ming and Qing catachresis funü to the May Fourth and Republican era nüxing and
finally into the Communist redeployment of funü. She is careful to point out that these
terms do not represent the “truth” of women, but rather the socio-linguistic possibilities
for talking about women. As such, she calls these terms “catachreses,” which, “[R]efers
to a particular misuse of a proper noun, where the term’s referent is, theoretically or
philosophically speaking, inadequate.”7 That is to say as she explores the development of
terms for women in pre-1911 China she discusses how women were defined by their
relationship to the family line, so that the term fu (married woman) plus the term nü
(unmarried woman) becomes the catachresis funü, “women,” implying that the only way
a woman could be defined was by her relation to the family as mother, daughter, or wife.
After the fall of the Qing Dynasty, and China’s contact with Western sexological
and eugenic theories in particular, there was a move to change this traditional
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nomenclature to reflect women’s changing position in society and China’s move towards
modernity. Barlow describes this shift as bringing about the use of the neologism nüxing
or, “one who is sexually (i.e. having the sexual organs of a) female.” Barlow points out
that this term was not much better as it overemphasized the link between women as
(hetero)sexual beings and their renge (selfhood), and while it may have liberated women
of their ties to the Confucian family line the new term reinforced the necessity of
women’s heterosexual reproduction for the betterment of the nation. As Barlow writes,
“[T]he new woman, the woman of standing, was also very explicitly theorized to be a
sexual being who required a ‘new lijiao’8 to clarify appropriately ethical means of
exercising her own legitimate will to pleasure.”9 Certainly not all of the Republican era
thinkers discussed the subject nüxing in the same terms; as Barlow shows, certain writers
questioned women’s ability to fully become agents in a system where their ability to
choose is circumscribed by the necessity that they bear children; by and large, however,
Barlow shows how writers like Gao Xian, Lin Zhaoyin, and Y.D. (Li Rongdi) were most
influential in their arguments that in order to come into possession of their own
personhood, women must be allowed to make their own (heteronormative) sexual
choices.
Similarly, Barlow discusses how in the language of the Chinese Communist
Party, the term funü is used to stand for all normative and decent women. This
redeployment of funü combined elements of the earlier association of funü with the
discourse of class, situating these women first in the family and then in the nation. As
Barlow describes, the Maoist funü subject was no longer the all-encompassing either
married or unmarried female subject of traditional Confucian ethics, nor the
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“‘Westernized,’ ‘bourgeois,’ ‘individualist,’ erotic”10 subject implied in the term nüxing
deployed by the earlier Republican sexologist reformers. The Maoist term, “[I]magined a
national woman, funü, intertwined directly in state processes over the period of social
revolution and socialist modernization who, because of her achievements as a state
subject, would modernize family practices….Funü…formed a part of the ‘system of
designations by…which’…Party ‘political authorities regulate[d] all important social
relationships.’”11 In all three cases Barlow discusses how the subject woman is
constructed socio-linguistically; however, after Deng Xiaoping’s Open Door reforms
once again opened spaces for debate, the question of how the liberated female subject
who has personhood would be constructed once again become a topic of inquiry.
Contemporary feminist theorists Li Xiaojiang and Dai Jinhua provide their own
responses to this question, as will be discussed later.
While the term funü is still actively used by the Party, especially through such
Party organizations as the All-China Women’s Federation (Fulian),12 in the post-Mao
years, with China’s newly opened economic and cultural spaces creating opportunities for
individuals to express themselves in ways not possible during the previous era,
essentialized gender difference and heteronormative sexual practices once more came to
the front of social awareness. In the same climate in which young women find themselves
looking for so-called “pink-collar” jobs, and contemplating “eating the rice bowl of
youth,”13 Chinese feminist theorists such as Li Xiaojiang and Dai Jinhua have been and
continue to promote their own kinds of “corporeal feminism” as a means to counteract
the kinds of gender oppression these new “Chinese Noras”14 are experiencing. Their
discussions of how to read the meaning of women provide one of the keys to
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understanding the avant-garde women’s creation of a private space, and why the
publication of their literature of privacy is so important to their project of resistance.
However, by locating female identity in the female body, this “Corporeal” Feminism also
runs the risk of essentializing gender difference, at the same time that it begs the question
of what exactly constitutes a woman.
It is in this context that the avant-garde writers must be understood. These
writers grew up with images of a female body as synonymous with the success of the
Communist vision, as depicted in films and posters, with phrases like “The happy family
life Chairman Mao gave us (1954),” and “It is a revolutionary requirement to marry late
(early 1970s),” as well as the “iron girls,” or as Meng Yue shows, in the way that
narratives in literature of the period place female subjects in relation to the Party.15
Moreover, these women came into their own as writers in the early post-Mao years
surrounded by the discourse of bodily feminism and political wounds,16 the self-
referential form became the only antidote, the only means to recapture the female body
and voice form the realm of public symbol. Moreover, in publishing these stories these
writers draw on the Chinese literary tradition which validates the feelings and
experiences of the private self through writing. However, by choosing to publish stories
of alternate forms of female desire, the bodies and selves these writers present remain
only partially accessible to the reading public, and in this way allow these writers to
control access to those bodies and by doing so prevent the meaning of these stories from
being solely determined by society and the reading public.
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Li Xiaojiang and Dai Jinhua’s “Corporeal” Feminisms
In the 1980s and 1990s, with the growth of the market economy, as well as the
“Culture Fever” (wenhua re), which followed in the wake of foreign ideas and goods as
they flowed into China for the first time in thirty years, the situation facing women again
changed dramatically. Zhang Zhen describes it well when she writes:
By the 1970s, the image of the iron maiden…with her steel shoulders and desexualized look, vital to the nation builders of the 1950s and 1960s, was already fast fading from popular memory. In the 1980s, fashion and new trends discreetly but decidedly began to reshape Chinese women’s self-perception and gender awareness. By the early 1990s, however, flourishing media (popular magazines, television, film, video, karaoke, advertising, and so on) began to transmit on a much broader scale images of a new breed of young women, emphasizing fashion, sensuality, sexuality, social mobility, and the fast-moving tempo of a postsocialist consumerist society.17
Along with these new images of feminine bodies came such ideas as the “rice bowl of
youth,” (青春饭 qingchunfan) the post-Mao era’s response to the earlier socialist concept
of the “iron rice bowl” (铁碗饭 tiewanfan). Where the “iron rice bowl” refers to the
certainty of work and security in old age in socialist China, the “rice bowl of youth”
illustrates the extent to which consumerism and the revitalization of sexological discourse
in post-Mao China had an effect particularly on young women’s images of self. Zhang
Zhen defines the term in this way:
The rice bowl of youth refers to the urban trend in which a range of new, highly paid positions have opened almost exclusively to women, as bilingual secretaries, public relations girls, and fashion models. Youth and beauty are the foremost, if not the only, prerequisites to obtaining lucrative positions, in which the new “professionals” often function as advertising fixtures with sex appeal.18
As more and more space opens for expressions of self, and men and women alike
negotiate the changing gender dynamics of an increasingly consumer-oriented and global
society, once again many Chinese intellectuals find themselves attempting to untangle the
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“woman question.” For feminists such as Li Xiaojiang and Dai Jinhua, this means the re-
gendering of the female body, in response to the sexless mass body of socialist feminism.
Both scholars use their own kinds of “corporeal feminism” to draw attention to how the
state’s discourse of equality effectively both masculinizes and neutralizes female bodies
by making men the standard to which women are compared. As Lisa Rofel points out,
“[P]ost-Mao feminists decry the invisibility of women’s bodies, as least those bodily
experiences that are distinct from labor. They argue that this invisibility keeps women
tied to an outmoded state feminism. It also makes it impossible for women to speak
about new forms of devaluation they experience.”19 However, the notion of corporeal
feminism is limited, as it begs the question of what kind of body constitutes a woman,
and how representations of that body are used both to further female agency as well as to
reinscribe gender discrimination.
Li Xiaojiang began writing in the 1980s, and is considered the founder of
women’s studies as an area of academic investigation in China. Her efforts led to the
creation of the first women’s studies classes and the first women’s studies department in
1985, as well as the Women’s Culture Museum, now housed at the Shaanxi Normal
University in Xi’an. In her writing, she advocates for what Tani Barlow has called a
kind of “market feminism” in which women express their agency and subjectivity
through consumption, particularly of domestic goods and services. For her, the erasure of
gender expression during the height of socialist China led to a denaturalization and
masculinization of women’s bodies; Li argues that by participating in the new consumer
economy, women can recover a sense of their feminine selves, as distinct and different
from men. As Tani Barlow says:
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It was not that the collective mass subject woman was wholly regrettable, in Li’s view, so much as that Maoist women had no body. The ideologically constructed [Maoist female subject] funü’s body did not menstruate, give birth, feel sexual desire, or seek out pleasure. If the positive features of funü were that it enabled individual women to achieve and affirm the rights of women in positive terms, the negative features of massified women were that she could not confirm her difference from man affirmatively.20
According to Li, because women had been awarded liberation by the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP), they had not yet had to earn for it for themselves, and the need to fight for
their recognition as a group distinct from men drives the need for contemporary women
to express their feminine singularity in the market economy, as well as for the
government to support policies that allow women the space to express themselves this
way. Related to this is her concept of the “double burden” in China: the idea that while
Communism offered equality of employment outside the home to women, it did not
change the older patriarchal structures which made women responsible for domestic labor
inside the home, so that women shouldered twice the responsibility of men. She writes
that she did not herself come into full self-knowledge as a woman until the birth of her
first child. Thus for her there is also a connection between reproduction and female
awareness. For Li, it is in the active presentation of the female body as gendered female,
by purchasing makeup and wearing more feminine clothes for example, as well as the
biologically female component of giving birth to a child, that a woman comes to
recognize herself as a gendered individual.
Dai Jinhua, whose writing represents trends more associated with the 1990s
contrasted with Li Xiaojiang in the 1980s,21 has a somewhat different take on the female
body, although she too advocates a kind of corporeal feminism. As a Lacanian literary
critic and film studies scholar, she is interested in both postsocialist developments and
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mass culture. She reads the social landscape of the 1990s as a “city of mirrors” that is
always reflecting back on itself images which are both full of meaning and empty
signifiers at the same time. Like Li Xiaojiang, Dai is critical of the state feminism of the
Mao-era, and the way it denaturalized the female body by making equality synonymous
with masculinity. She is also concerned with female awareness of self, particularly in
regards to representations of the female body. Like Li, for Dai gender difference is
located in the female body and heterosexually aligned. However rather than calling for
women to express themselves economically as consumers and to follow a more or less
maternal path to female self-awareness, Dai expresses concern both with the politics of
consumption and representation, as well as with the idea that the “truth” of female
existence is knowable and rooted in female experience. Rather, Dai argues that women
become female when they write or otherwise represent themselves, particularly in the age
of global media. In her construction, much like Li’s, gender difference is fundamental to
her argument that women “excavate”22 themselves out of masculine culture. She is also
sensitive to the problematic nature of desire and the male gaze, for in as much as women
create themselves by writing, so too are they bound by the forces of the market. She
writes:
Although Chinese culture in the New Era (post-1979 period) can be seen as patriarchal culture’s counterattack against the gender equality of the previous era, the emergence of women’s writing is nevertheless one of the most important new developments on the cultural scene. However, one problem is that while men’s writing openly presents its male perspective as the mainstream paradigm to be followed, women writers are always vague in the expression of their gender….Meanwhile, as a voice of gender and political resistance against the official discourse of “women’s liberation,” women’s writing stresses gender differences. Yet that stress, on the one hand, leads them into the old rut of classic gender essentialism and, on the other hand, makes it easy for the patriarchal discourse to appropriate.23
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That is to say in as much as women create themselves by writing the self, the
representations of the female body that they create can also be used to support the
patriarchal order, or to serve male desire and the male gaze. An example of this can be
seen in the “rice bowl of youth” phenomenon mentioned above. Young women who
have started to “eat the rice bowl of youth” both assert themselves as individuals at the
same time that they reinforce gender norms and the male gaze. As Zhang Zhen reminds
us, while there is no doubt that the so-called “rice bowl of youth” has brought to young
women a kind of agency that had never existed before in China, in their ability to
consume as they please and determine where and for whom they will work, it is a double-
edged sword. Their agency is tied to both their youth and beauty, and also reinforces the
association of women’s bodies with “pink collar” and other sexualized jobs, and requires
that these eaters of the rice bowl of youth express themselves according to the value
system of male desires. As Mayfair Yang notes:
It is not so much that the meaning of woman is expressed through sexual difference, as the meaning of woman comes to be sexual difference. In the sexual economy, women are invested (literally and economically) with the quality of “to-be-looked-at-ness,” and their function is to provide a contrastive background against which male subjectivity is foregrounded and brought into sharper relief. The effect of making women palpably visible is to make viewers identify with the subject-position of the male eye. In this way, male subjectivity and its power are made invisible, as in the Maoist gender order, but this invisibility is not based on an erasure or blurring of genders but depends on the hypervisibility of the female image.24
To put it another way: as women begin to make use of and capitalize on the newly
opened and opening public spaces to express themselves and assert themselves as agents,
they also become vulnerable to the dominant culture’s interpretation of those selves.
That is to say, in order to express themselves in the public sphere they must conform to
the public expectation of what a woman is, thereby reinforcing the validity of that
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singular interpretation of the female body. The female avant-garde writers, on the other
hand, purposefully write bodies which are only partially consumable by the reading
public, insisting on their own private experience and private selves as a means to resist
the dominant culture’s appropriation and interpretation of the female form.
The Avant-garde Writers: Reclaiming the Self and Mediating Consumption
The criticism most frequently aimed at the avant-garde women writers is that they
are self-exploitative, and capitalize on the reading public’s desire to know the
most intimate and titillating details of women’s sexual lives. As Kong Shuyu writes:
Privacy literature has caused a storm of controversy over the past eight years. Feminists have defended its descriptions of “gendered experience” (xingbie jingyan); moral apologists have accused it of being little different from soft pornography. Much of the controversy has revolved around the misleading impressions given of these women writers’ works, first spread by publishers and, more recently, encouraged and exploited by the writers themselves.25
For example, two of the contributors to Chinese Concepts of Privacy, Chen Xiaoming
and Robin Visser, also focus on issues of privacy in the works of the female avant-garde
writers. McDougall summarizes their arguments, saying:
The flagrant self-exposure in the so-called “women’s privacy fiction” appears to reduce the content of privacy to sexual experience and diminish its function to commercial profit and narcissism. Privacy for sale demands a high price: the loss of the writer’s own privacy.26
While this is certainly one valid interpretation of the avant-garde women’s literature of
privacy, it privileges the publishers’ commercial intentions over the authors’ purposes in
writing. Xu Kun, one of the three authors highlighted in this study, wrote of the
publishing phenomenon which surrounded the Fourth World Conference on Women
organized by the UN Commission on the Status of Women held in Beijing in 1995 in her
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article, “Brighter and Brighter from Now On.”27 Perplexed by the tension between the
interest in women’s writing and the commercialization of “selling women” as she calls it,
she presents a different view of the situation and sudden interest in women’s writing,
saying that:
We all yearn for success, but we cannot attain it on our own by directly combating the patriarchal culture. So instead we participate in this collective show, creating a spectacle in order to “sell” ourselves. They [the male-dominated publishers, editors, and mass media] can sell us at a higher price than if we tried to sell ourselves….Our lost and forgotten gender and sexual identity are now suddenly remembered with the approach of the UN World Women’s Conference. Captivated by the huge potential profits, they deliberately emphasize our femaleness, and we feel that we cannot escape from our sex ….We certainly need not worry that the tickets won’t sell and our performance will have no audience. But who are the viewers and the director? And who the performers? Who will watch our naked parade and see us perform out earnest striptease?28
As Xu Kun and Kong Shuyu note, the relationship between these competing intentions
and the extent to which publishers’ desire to market and sell this literature had an effect
on the content of that literature. Kong goes on to describe the process by which
publishers helped to mediate the way these works of literary privacy were consumed by
the reading public. While in the early 1990s publishers offered high-quality collections
of women’s writing, by the mid-1990s the quality of these collections had fallen
significantly. As she writes:
They were now shockingly vulgar, little different from the pulp fiction and popular magazines sold at private bookstalls. This was quite incongruous, considering that their content had not changed at all. This sensationalism of the changes is clear when we compare some of the new titles with the originals: Memory and Feeling, the original title of the personal essay volume, had become Trapped Women: Women’s Confessional Literature; and Privacy Revealed, one of the fiction volumes, became Imprisoned: Women’s Sexual Literature. Other title changes: the wicked-sounding Dream Demoness: Feminist Literature instead of the innocuous original, Endless Sadness; and Variations: Women’s Heretical Literature instead of the rather sober One Kind of Memory and Emotion.29
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Moreover, using the case of Lin Bai’s One Person’s War as an example, Kong goes on to
show how publishers would print these works with overtly sexual covers and titles, or
with the text of the work changed to highlight the descriptions of sexual behavior. These
kinds of changes not only led to increased sales for the publishers themselves, but also to
a misunderstanding of these writers’ literature of privacy as being entirely focused on sex
and sexuality rather than on the insistence on private, individual experience.
Feminists such as Dai Jinhua on the other hand, have praised the female avant-
garde writers for representing female experience in its totality as necessary and
appropriate. As previously discussed, for Dai it is in the process of fashioning images of
womanhood that women counteract the oppression of state feminism and male culture.
She writes:
The most noteworthy works thus produced are the autobiographies and semiautobiographies by a group of young women born in the sixties. They bravely write “my body” and “my self,” narrate their gender and sexual experiences, and record their fear of and longing for sisterhood and lesbian relationships. Not since 1949 has women’s writing entered the cultural scene in a more shocking manner than it does now. However, patriarchal culture, especially patriarchal commercial culture, has at the same time started an operation in order to use and then sacrifice this rich resource of women’s culture. Brave and frank confessions of women are constantly dug up and invested with commercial value. Male publishers and male critics time and again repackage women writers’ candid expositions of the female body, female desire, and their self-inquiry into a marketing formula…But women’s writing continues to appear in a clearer and more forceful voice, resisting the new cultural exploitation. The resistance is unprecedentedly clearer and more forceful, and also fully conscious of the present state of women’s gender existence. It is deeply introspective, once again transcending and subverting the old gender order to a new cultural level. Sisterhood is no longer defined in the narrower lesbian sense, or in the sense of women’s escapist utopia, but has become a clear depiction of a female space and an expression of an ideal feminist society.30
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In addition, feminist writers have also argued that commercialization can provide a
means for women to resist the oppression of male culture through market demands for
depictions of female sexuality. As Mayfair Yang says,
Mass consumer culture supplies this missing ingredient in state feminism: the power of sexuality in reconstructing gender. The potential that this new sexual culture harbors for a women’s movement is infusing women with an active female desire so that feminism can rely less on the protection of a paternal state.31
It is therefore important to understand that depictions of female sexuality liberated from
male desire and injected into the consumer culture of male-sponsored Chinese state
feminism, which insists on a gender-neutral mass subject and considers the so-called
“woman question” solved, can be both a tool for women to excavate themselves out of
that culture as well as a means by which the images of these female bodies are
reappropriated for commercial gain and for the pleasure of the male gaze, as Dai Jinhua
notes. Given these two competing ways of looking at women’s literary depictions of
female sexuality, how are we then to distinguish literature for profit from literature as
resistance? And more specifically, how can we argue that the avant-garde women
writers’ use of alternative forms of female sexuality as a narrative device is being used to
create a space for their personal expressions of self rather than towards commercial ends?
It is because these writers depict alternative forms of female sexuality that remain
partially veiled to the reading public that they are able to create a space of si-privacy in
their fiction, a space which allows for these writers’ explorations of self and which is
strengthened by their inclusion of self-referential details.
As such it is perhaps more useful to consider Patricia Waugh’s term “metafiction”
to describe the semi-autobiographical works of the female avant-garde writers and how
this form relates their project of si-privacy. As Todd Kontje discusses in his work on the
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German bildungsroman, the term “metafiction” refers to, “fictional writing which self-
consciously and systematically draws attention to itself as an artifact in order to pose
questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.”32 Specifically, in defining
the term, and also the genre, of literary creation that is metafiction, Waugh writes that:
What it does is to re-examine the conventions of realism in order to discover—through its own self-reflection—a fictional form that is culturally relevant and comprehensible to contemporary readers. In showing us how literary fiction creates its imaginary worlds, metafiction helps us to understand how the reality we live day by day is similarly constructed, similarly “written.”33
That is to say, metafiction draws attention to itself as a constructed literary form in order
to expose the both the artifice of language as well as that of society built on language.
However, metafiction does not completely overthrow novelistic convention; as Waugh
says, while metafiction plays with the conventions of realism, “it does not ignore or
abandon them.”34 Metafiction rather can be seen as the post-modern step following the
progression of eighteenth and nineteenth century realism and the alienation and
juxtaposition between self and other in modernism. It is this self-consciousness of fiction
as a critical medium that separates it from the autobiographical or semi-autobiographical
form: the female avant-garde writers are not simply concerned with writing the self, but
also with fashioning a private female body which both resists appropriation by the
dominant (male) culture, and which can be only partially consumed by the reading
public.
Although Kontje presents the German bildungsroman as precursor to the
postmodern form, there are many points of overlap which make an understanding of the
bildungsroman in eighteenth century Germany useful to a general understanding of
fiction in China at the end of the twenty-first century. Superficially at least, post-Deng
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and Open Door Policy China is much like Kontje’s description of Germany and German
nationalism during the period the bildungsroman developed as a form: a switch in literary
tastes from more orthodox reading material (Latin theology in Germany and state-
approved material in Cultural Revolution-era China) to the novel. Furthermore this
“literary revolution” happened rather late in both places and with impressive speed,
leading to the subsequent commercialization of the form and a resulting tension between
the writers’ intentions and the public’s desires. As Kontje writes, “The book had become
a commodity, and if the writers hoped to profit from their publications, they had to give
the public what it wanted, not what the writers felt it needed.”35 In the case of the
German bildungsroman, Kontje argues that the authors who developed the form instead
ended up creating a kind of pre-postmodern form, which existed between both high and
popular culture, “Neither intoxicating the readers with sensory stimuli, nor browbeating
them with moral lessons.”36 This “pre-postmodern” form, with its insistence on sharing
personal experience with the reading public, as well as the corresponding tension
between the authors’ creative impulses and the publishers’ and reading public’s desires
closely mirrors the avant-garde women writers’ situation in China, especially in their
desire to create and publish (make public) a private self. Moreover, there is within the
bildungsroman genre a focus on self-reflection as well as what Steven Greenblatt calls
“self-fashioning:”
Self-fashioning derives its interest precisely from the fact that it functions without regard for a sharp distinction between literature and social life. It invariably crosses the boundaries between the creation of literary characters, the shaping of one’s own identity, the experience of being molded by forces outside one’s control, the attempt to fashion other selves.37
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While much of the fiction produced by men and women in post-Mao China engages in a
project of self-fashioning, it is particularly important for understanding what it is that
makes the fiction of the female avant-garde writers unique. Coupled with their particular
use of si-privacy, this project of self-fashioning actually results in what is normally seen
as a negative value, the overly self-involved si, used as a positive tool. As Waugh says,
“Metafiction thus converts what it sees as the negative values of outworn literary
conventions into the basis of a potentially constructive social criticism.”38 This applies as
much to those works by the female avant-garde writers which are “similar modes”39 to
metafiction such as the “self begetting-novel,” which Waugh describes as “[A]n ‘account
usually first person, or the development of a character to a point at which he is able to
take up and compose the novel we have just finished reading,” as in Lin Bai’s One
Person’s War and Chen Ran’s A Private Life. Thus we can see how the self-referential
novel form is a fundamental part of the avant-garde women writers’ project: it allows
them to not only redefine si-privacy, for them no longer a negative attribute, and use it
instead for their own positive reclamations of self; but also how important the act of
publishing (i.e. making public) such a novel about a si-private self would be, as
metafiction by its very nature exposes the artifice of language and society. In doing so
these works, like Virginia Woolfe’s A Room of One’s Own and Gloria Anzaldúa’s
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, become acts of resistance to the
male/heterosexual/state appropriation of female voice and image.
Considering Chinese women’s avant-garde writing and their reclamation of si-
privacy as a positive tool for expressing themselves in terms of metafiction helps to
resolve some of the tension between the authors’ intentions and the publishers’ aims.
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That is to say, in writing works of fiction which in and of themselves draw attention to
themselves as works of fiction and play with both social and novelistic conventions, it
becomes less problematic that publishers also seek to capitalize on these works than if
they were labeled as autobiographies or memoirs, for example. While critical reasoning
reminds us that the genres of autobiography and memoir are as much constructed by the
author as are works of fiction, as Philippe Lejeune notes, the reader can accept the
autobiographical form as verifiable because of what he calls the “autobiographical pact”
between author and reader.40 When publishers market women’s avant-garde self-
referential fiction as the “truth” of women’s personal experiences, it allows them to play
to a voyeuristic consumer market by invoking this “autobiographical pact.” Closer
inspection, however, shows that these female writers are drawing on a form of fiction
which references itself as fiction and injecting details of their personal lives into that
fiction in order to disrupt and resist the appropriated female body. In playing with
novelistic forms and injecting details of lived experience into the fictional worlds they
create, the avant-garde writers as a whole engage in projects very similar to other
metafictional writers to whom they are often compared, such as Gabriel García Márquez
(Mo Yan) and Jorge Luis Borges (Yu Hua). Specific to the female avant-garde writers,
as in the case of the German bildungsroman, this helps to explain why they are often so
abstract, opaque, and otherwise difficult for the reader to fully understand. Their fiction
explores the tension between fiction and reality and blurs the boundaries between the
public and the private, the self and society. It also helps to explain why the female avant-
garde writers insist on alternate forms of female experience beyond the heterosexual wife
and mother—in fashioning what Judith Butler calls “abject” bodies, the female avant-
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garde writers represent female bodies which are outside the dominant paradigm, and thus
beyond the pale of easy appropriation and consumption.
In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” Judith Butler considers
how bodies, and by extension, gender and sexuality are constructed rather than given.
She problematizes both the notion of an essentialized body/gender/sexuality, which says
that because one is born with male or female sexual organs their behavior is biologically
determined, as well as the idea that gender is simply performative. As she says:
[I]f I were to argue that genders are performative, that could mean that I thought that one woke in the morning, perused the closet or some more open space for the gender of choice, donned that gender for the day, and then restored the garment to its place at night. Such a willful and instrumental subject, one who decides on its gender, is clearly not its gender from the start and fails to realize that its existence is already decided by gender.41 Rather, Butler argues that bodies are materialized, that is, given meaning by the
normative functions of society, and out of these meanings come the performative aspects
of gender and sexuality. She discusses how hegemonic societal norms are written onto
the body from the moment of birth. Thus an infant born biologically male will be
instructed in what society has determined is male gender performance, and the same for
those born biologically female. When these embodied subjects perform their genders in
the socially approved manner their bodies become “intelligible.” Subjects who do not
perform according to social norms become “abject,” as Butler describes:
This latter domain is not the opposite of the former (viz. intelligible bodies), for oppositions are, after all, a part of intelligibility; the latter is the excluded and illegible domain that haunts the former domain as the spectre of its own impossibility, the very limit to intelligibility, its constitutive outside.42 Here Butler is saying that abject bodies are not the opposite of intelligible bodies, but
rather that group which is beyond the pale of the intelligible—“those who do not matter
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in some way.”43 She goes on to argue that sex as a discursive category is just one way in
which a body is made intelligible or abject—societal norms dictate that the heterosexual
body is livable, while the homosexual body is not, and therefore it becomes abject.
Understanding bodies as being materialized as well as constructed is significant to
the works of the avant-garde women writers given their project of privacy as being bound
up in the self. Returning again to the criticism usually aimed at the works of the female
avant-garde writers, Butler’s theories of materialization and embodiment provide an
alternate reading. Rather than look at the publication of these works as a loss of privacy,
I argue that the publication of the private spaces constructed by the female avant-garde
writers in their fiction represents the attempt to make that which is unreadable (unlivable,
abject, valueless), readable (intelligible, valuable). From the point of view of male-
centered society the female body already borders on the unlivable, and the only way to
rescue that body is to reconstruct it in terms that male-centered society can understand:
heterosexual wife and mother. As Dai Jinhua discusses, the Chinese cultural landscape
of the 1980s pitted the male intellectual against the power of state authority in what she
describes as a father/son relationship.44 She goes to say that, “[I]n this allegory of
Chinese history with a father-son relation as its central metaphor, women must accept the
terms of the male-identified culture.”45 The female body which does not conform to the
social expectations of heterosexual partnership is by definition unreadable. Tani
Barlow’s reading of the linguistic catachreses for “woman” as implying either unmarried
girlhood or married motherhood shows how there is literally no way to write an alternate
form of female existence. And more than just being a linguistic difficulty to write about
women, because of the political appropriation of the female image and the female voice it
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becomes doubly impossible to convey female experiences that exist beyond the level of
metaphor; because a women’s body and voice already exist in the public consciousness
on the level of symbol, its meaning is never determined by her, never her own. The
female avant-garde women writers choose to write about bodies which exist beyond the
pale because these are bodies which are not already burdened with pre-determined
meaning within the Chinese political and social context.46 Moreover, rather than forcing
the abject bodies they write about to become intelligible, i.e. ending up happily married
and having children, and in that sense reifying the cultural forces which made them abject
in the first place, these authors maintain unincorporated abject bodies in their fiction.
Take, for example, two of the most well-known works by female avant-garde writers:
One Person’s War by Lin Bai and A Private Life by Chen Ran. In One Person’s War, the
protagonist Lin Duomi begins and ends the novel as a woman “marrying herself.” As
Tze-lan Sang describes:
It opens with a little girl gazing at and pleasuring herself in front of a mirror. The image is echoed at the end of the novel, this time with a grown woman watching and penetrating herself. The little girl has matured and experienced adventure, love, and marriage. However, unable to find affection and trust in her male lovers, and equally unable to find a passage leading her back to the primordial women’s paradise of her fantasies, she becomes her own lover once more….Far from the crude assumption that the one person’s war of the title is simply Duomi’s declaration of war against men, her personal declaration of independence, as it were, the words allude to many different battles, including one against the self…..Only after she has experienced humiliation and debasement at the hands of a series of selfish and unloving men does she realize the worth to a woman of freedom and self-reliance.47
In the course of the novel Lin Bai describes a girl who is fascinated by her own body and
engages in erotic play, who grows up to be fascinated by beautiful women, but is never
fully able to express her attraction to them either; a woman who has no special feelings of
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attraction to men but who has a number of damaging relationships with them until in the
end she becomes her own lover once again.
Were it Lin’s intention to make her protagonist intelligible in the Butlerian sense,
she gives herself ample opportunities to do so. Duomi could have easily found herself in
one of the unequal, loveless marriages one finds in Zhang Jie and Wang Anyi’s fiction.
However, in ultimately having Duomi choose herself as her lover at the end of the novel,
Lin resists reconstructing her heroine in a socially-readable body. This allows her to
limit access to that body and as such presents another kind of resistance, in addition to
that of the appropriated female body/image/voice. And so it is in this sense that the
description McDougall offers, of privacy as controlled access, is the most fitting way to
understand the works of the female avant-garde writers.
Conclusion: The Chi Li Phenomenon and the Trap of Publication
The concept of materialization becomes doubly relevant when these works of the
avant-garde women writers are adapted for television and film. The very nature of these
visual media forces us to consider the relationship between “public” and “private,” for
while films and television shows are made for public consumption, they often present
facets of life which are considered to be the exclusive province of the private individual.
Mayfair Yang writes:
Television…broadcasts endless representations of private domestic life to a general public. This making public of a private domestic sphere can have the effect of opening up the private to public discussion and debate…so that gender relations within the home are brought to public reflection and revision. Thus, television is an important medium that interpenetrates public and domestic spheres and can also serve as a facilitator (although usually not an arena) for the public sphere.48
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Much like the fiction of the avant-garde women writers, television too can be said to be a
kind of “borderland.” Unlike the avant-garde women writers, while television programs
do blur the lines between public and private and, as Yang says, bring certain issues into
the public debate, ultimately that debate reifies the underlying dominant discourse rather
than providing alternatives to it. A perfect example of this is the “Chi Li phenomenon,”
and how it highlights some of the inherent problems of media-crossing and
materialization.
While not usually considered an avant-garde writer, Chi Li presents an interesting
case to look at in the framework of embodiment and materialization. Much like her
avant-garde counterparts, she was born just before the Cultural Revolution (1957) and
began writing in the 1980s. Her works of Neo-Realism resist the rigidly structured,
over(t)ly political fiction of the Socialist Realists by focusing the individual. In the
1990s, several of her works were adapted for film and television and became hugely
popular, sparking what critics call the “Chi Li phenomenon”—the on-screen fascination
with the quotidian aspects of “normal” people’s everyday lives. Yet when these works
have been adapted for television, the same appropriation of the female image that we
have seen in previous areas and public forms presents itself again, although in a new
guise. Lu Hongwei’s analysis of the four main female characters in Chi Li’s novella
Comes and Goes (Lailai wangwang) details how they are adapted from the written page
into public figures fit for mass consumption and mass idealization.49 Although Chi Li as
an author may be concerned with the level of the individual and personal experience,
once these characters have been cast into real, physical bodies they again become
metaphors, either for the outdated Maoist social order (Duan Lina) or the sexualized
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transnational capitalist (Lin Zhu); or as the symbolic representation of the self-involved
new generation (Shi Yupeng). In either case, in the transition from the written word to
the visual image, these women have lost their validity as actual feeling subjects and can
only exist at the level of social symbol, breathing new life into patriarchal gender codes.
It is telling for a number of reasons that several works by the male avant-garde
writers have been adapted for film, such as Yu Hua’s To Live, Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum,
and Su Tong’s Raise the Red Lantern. These include the elevation of an individual’s
story, such as the “I” narrator’s story of his grandfather and grandmother’s experiences in
the early decades of the twentieth century in Red Sorghum, to the level of allegory, as
well as the expected (self-)orientalized depictions of trauma on screen. In these
depictions it is once again women’s bodies which become metaphoric; in this visual
medium they also become the eroticized objects of the male gaze, as in Gong Li’s
characters in Raise the Red Lantern and Red Sorghum. This is equally true of the wound
writers as well; while their stories represent the sum of an individual’s experiences during
the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, together they represent a mass critique
of Mao’s policies, and play to the expectations of the reading audience. Rather it is in the
works of two other Fifth Generation directors, Hu Mei and Peng Xiaolian, that we can
see the extension of the female avant-garde writers project of privacy made public and
maintained in the translation to the visual medium of film. Their works, whether
adaptations of fiction, like Hu Mei’s Army Nurse (Nü’er lou, 1985), or films that they
have written themselves, like Peng Xiaolian’s Women’s Story (Nüren de gushi, 1989),
reflect similar concerns with the female avant-garde writers. As Hu Mei says, “The most
important thing is to stand in a position where one can see the world from what is
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completely a woman’s angle. Only if this is achieved will we be able to produce a real
‘women’s cinema.’”50 While it is beyond the scope of this paper to look at the
development of such a “women’s cinema” in China, an investigation of the dynamics of
self-expression and expressions of si-privacy in the works of female directors such as Hu
Mei, Peng Xiaolian, and Huang Shuqin amongst others is certainly warranted.
Notes 1 Wang Lingzhen, 5. 2 Joan Judge, The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). Introduction in particular. 3 Judge, 2. 4 Judge, 16. 5 Judge, 79-80. 6 Judge, 59. 7 Tani E. Barlow, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 1. 8 See Barlow’s analysis of lijiao, or the Confucian code of ethics, in The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism Chapter One, pages 25-26 in particular. 9 Barlow, 120. 10 Barlow, 38. 11 Barlow, 38. 12 Fulian (Zhonghua quanguo funü lianhehui 中华全国妇女联合会) began to refer to itself as an NGO in 1995, although it is still strongly influenced by Party doctrine. 13 See Zhen Zhang’s definition in, “Mediating Time: The ‘Rice Bowl of Youth’ in Fin de Siècle Urban China,” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000), 94. 14 This refers to the May Fourth era New Woman, after Nora’s character from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. The May Fourth Chinese Nora” left her home and traditional roles in
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pursuit of education and self-determination, especially the freedom to choose her own marriage partner. The term surfaces again in the 1980s, especially in feminist writing. 15 See note 22 16 Referring to the “wound literature” (shanghen wenxue 伤痕文学) that became very prevalent in the early 1980s. These stories were often written as memoirs or as thinly veiled self-referential works of fiction and usually dealt specifically with trauma suffered during the Cultural Revolution. 17 Zhang Zhen, 98. 18 Zhang Zhen, 94. 19 Lisa Rofel, “Museum as Women’s Space: Displays of Gender in Post-Mao China,” in Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, ed., Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 122. 20 Barlow, 275. 21 Although both scholars are still quite active and their work continues to adjust to the changing situation of contemporary China, the core of their respective approaches remains the same, and reflects to a certain extent the times in which they each began writing. 22 See Barlow’s summary of Dai Jinhua, 306-307. 23 Dai Jinhua, “Rewriting Chinese Women: Gender Production and Cultural Space in the Eighties and Nineties,” in Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, ed., Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 202-203. 24 Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, “From Gender Erasure to Gender Difference: State Feminism, Consumer Sexuality, and Women’s Publics Sphere in China,” in Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, ed., Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 50. 25 Shuyu Kong, Consuming Literature: Best Sellers and the Commercialization of Literary Production in Contemporary China, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 102 26 McDougall and Hansson, 23. 27 Kong, 99-100. 28 Ibid. 29 Kong, 101.
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30 Dai, 204. 31 Yang, 61. 32 Quote from Patricia Waugh in Todd Kontje, Private Lives in the Public Sphere: The German Bildungsroman as Metafiction, (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 11. 33 Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, (London and New York: Methuen, 1984), 18. 34 Waugh, 18. 35 Kontje, chapter 1; see especially pages 1 and 2. In the case of China, the kind of literary revolution Kontje describes is not new to Chinese literary history, as discussions of the development of fiction in China (see McMahon, Epstein, Lee, et al.) have previously covered, although after the narrow confines of the Cultural Revolution certain parallels can be drawn. Quote, pg. 4 36 Kontje, 4. 37 Quote from Steven Greenblatt in Kontje, 8-9. 38 Waugh, 11. 39 Waugh, 13. 40 See Chapter 1; also Note 43 41 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” (New York: Routledge, 1993), x. 42 Butler, xi. 43 Butler, xi. 44 In fact, Dai refers not just to the 1980s but Chinese history as a whole, although in the context of 1980s cultural production. See Dai, 193-194. 45 Dai, 193. 46 Another possible area of inquiry into how self-writing and writing the abject body intersect would be to look at fiction written be people with disabilities, as the disabled body represents another kind of socially-unintelligible body. Such an inquiry, however, is beyond the scope of this dissertation. 47 Sang, 194-196. 48 Yang, 27.
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49 Lu Hongwei, “TV Romance and Popular Cultural Mood: The Chi Li Phenomenon,” The China Review 6:1 (Spring 2006). 50 Chris Berry, “Interwiew with Hu Mei,” Camera Obscura 18 (September 1988), 36.
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CHAPTER IV
SELF-ISH WRITING: MEDIATING HISTORY, THEORY, AND THE FEMALE
BODY IN THE WORKS OF XU KUN
“I prefer that kind of penetrating, forceful writing, which pierces through all of those tempered appearances and embodies the true essence of human nature, and unceasingly,
torturously interrogates life.”1 -Xu Kun, Notes on My Life
Xu Kun was born in March 1965 in Shenyang. She attended Liaoning University
from 1982 to 1989. From 1990 to 1996 she was in the Asia-Pacific Culture and Literary
Studies Department at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. She began writing in
1993 and is currently in residence in the Literature Studies Department at the Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences. She is a top-level writer in the Beijing Writer’s
Association, and a committee member in both the Beijing Youth League and All China
Writer’s Association. Called the “female Wang Shuo,” and heavily influenced by Wang
Meng, her unique approach caused literary circles to take notice of her and follow her as
a writer, and she has won multiple literary prizes for her works of fiction. Of the writers
examined here, Xu Kun’s fiction has the most theoretical overtones. She frequently
engages with history, often focusing on educated youth and the Cultural Revolution in
her fiction. Given her relationship to the Party, vis à vis her political affiliations, there is
quite a bit about her writing that invites comparison with other writers such as Tie Ning,
Zhang Jie, and Wang Anyi. Moreover, her work also shows the influence of Chinese
feminists such as Dai Jinhua, who is in fact frequently mentioned in the reference
materials included alongside Xu Kun’s works. However, she is also one of the
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“youngest” writers; whereas Can Xue began writing in 1983 and Lin Bai in 1982, Xu
Kun herself did not start until much later, after both the height of the Culture Fever of the
1980s and the events of June 4, 1989 and the subsequent tightening of restrictions and
commercialization of the literary market. As previously mentioned, comparisons are also
frequently made between her work and both Wang Shuo and Wang Meng; while her
characters are not quite the “hooligans” that Wang Shuo writes in his fiction, they are
frequently similarly unsympathetic and coarse. This is mirrored in her use of extremely
colloquial Northern speech patterns and slang, although she also frequently employs a
poetic voice, much like Lin Bai. Like Wang Meng she too writes frequently about social
conditions and relationships, and like him she also has more experimental works. But
binding all of these different facets of Xu Kun’s fiction together is her fundamental
interest in the condition of women’s lives as viewed through multiple lenses: the
historical, the feminist, the political, the academic, and above all a fundamental interest in
women’s writing and the creation of a female self. And it is in this creation of the female
self through writing that Xu Kun, like Hai Nan and Lin Bai, engages in a project of si-
privacy.
Mediating Patriarchal Culture and Women’s Writing: Xu Kun’s Notes on My Life
In Xu Kun’s theoretical writing, two main themes emerge: the interrogation of
history and search for women’s subjectivity. She writes on many different topics, most
of which focus either on women’s lives and experiences in history or with literary
production and artistic creation. Her 2001 collection Men’s Feelings Women’s Feelings
(Xingqing nan nü) is a series of short essays written about other writers and
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contemporaries, as well as topical essays, several of which would also be reprinted in her
2006 Notes from My Life. These essays were originally serialized in both Fiction
Monthly and Youth Literature. Xu Kun was motivated to write by many of the same
concerns as her contemporaries, most notably the problems that artists and writers face in
an increasingly commercialized market. She remarks on this in a later essay also titled
“Men’s Feelings Women’s Feelings” and its effect on her development as a literary
personality as well as her literary creation of self in the course of writing these serialized
essays.2 She describes how these serialized essays were written during a particularly
difficult period in her life and how the writing of these essays allowed her both to get
through that period as well to grow as an individual. Moreover, she remarks how it was
in the writing of these essays that she came into full knowledge of herself as an
individual, that is, how through the act of writing she created herself:
Now, when my fingers caress my past writing, an impalpable strange feeling wells up in my heart: is it possible that I really wrote this? Did I really previously ever even briefly have literary talent? Amidst this indulgence in self-admiration, it seems like I don’t recognize myself, and like I am meeting myself again…. As I listen to the sound of these clean pages rustling at my fingertips, it turns out to be the tinkling sound of the glacier in my heart blossoming little bit by little bit into happiness.3
She often makes connections between the act of writing and the author’s physical body,
particularly when that writing is done by hand. She has a particular disdain for internet
writing, remarking that there is no way to get a real sense of the author from words that
appear on the computer, that they are too mechanical; in this her opinions are very similar
to those of Lin Bai, who also prefers the more personal act of writing by hand rather than
typing on the computer.4 For Xu Kun, the act of writing has already been culturally-
predetermined as a male act, because of the dominance of patriarchal culture, and
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therefore it is impossible to uncover a woman’s true voice from inside this form,
however, it is in the act of writing that a woman learns how to regard herself, how to
construct herself. When she looks back at the pages of her own writing she can finally
gaze at herself and see herself, and thereby construct a self that is complete. She
discusses this connection between self-creation and literary talent at length in her
collection of essays titled, Notes on My Life.
Notes on My Life is divided into five sections, “Sensing the Flavor of True
Emotions,” “The Creative Process,” “For My Friends, A Faithful Representation,” “How
I View Feminism,” and “My Life: Miscellanea.” The essays, written between 1995 and
2006, are grouped according to these general section headings and cover a variety of
topics ranging from her family, marriage, and post-divorce life, her development as a
writer, her struggles and successes, and her views on writing, culture, history, education,
and feminism, to her feelings about soccer and popular culture, such as the Icelandic
singer Björk. As previously mentioned, two topics which figure most prominently in
these essays are the connections between women, writing, and culture, and her own
development as a writer. She speaks at length about the difficulties of being a “woman
writer,” and takes a highly theoretical and academic approach to understanding the
relationships between women, writing, culture, patriarchy, and feminism. For her there is
no one simple solution for how women might best come into possession of themselves as
agents of culture, although the act of writing figures very prominently in how she
believes that women might best begin to counteract the effects of patriarchal culture.
For example, in her essay titled, “A Room of One’s Own,” Xu Kun laments the
way that women are cut off from full subjectivity by society. Written as a response to
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and meditation on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Xu Kun describes reading
both Woolf and Simone de Bouvoir’s The Second Sex as a young woman, and how this
has shaped her understanding of contemporary Chinese women’s writing. She says:
At that time we twenty-some-year-olds, literary young women immediately opened our eyes and were enlightened out of barbarism to understand that the reason why women cannot write good fiction and cannot become great literary masters—is that we don’t have a room which belongs to ourselves!5
While Xu Kun acknowledges that Woolf, an English woman writing at the beginning of
the twentieth century, faced the oppression of inequality in a way that she herself and her
contemporaries at the end of the twentieth century do not, she argues that Woolf’s basic
point holds true—in order for a woman to truly come into possession of herself as a
complete subject she must have access to a space that is all her own where she can create
herself through her writing. This “room of one’s own,” in other words, is a space of si-
privacy, where these female authors are free to create themselves as individuals, away
from the state appropriated and culturally determined meanings that their bodies carry.
Xu Kun goes on to comment in this essay that not only women but men too are
subject to the same state forces that prevent them from having a “room of their own.”
She uses the metaphor of the room to argue that because of state power neither men nor
women have the ability to freely acquire a room for themselves where they can create this
private space. However, she then goes on to acknowledge that despite this, men still have
access to the benefits that system offers by virtue of their gender. She explains that,
“’Gender’ refers particularly to ‘women’s’ gender; male literary history already has no
need to stress such a thing. The whole of recorded human history is their history, and
even more so with ‘literature,’ this small branch of learning.”6 As she points out,
maleness has been so socially encoded as being synonymous with personhood, that when
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academics speak of “gender problems” (性别问题 xingbie wenti) or “gendered writing”
(性别写作 xingbie xiezuo) they are actually speaking about the problems that women
face, or writing which focuses primarily on women. Men, because of their dominant
position in patriarchal culture are subjects, while women are gendered subjects. In
another essay she goes on to say that:
Men have mastered this society’s philosophy, religion, ethics, and law, as well as the right to define and explain all social regulations. They have even taken full responsibility for indicating and annotating what is meant by “man,” and what is meant by “woman.” In this kind of situation, women have even lost the right to decide how to regard themselves; they are only in a position “to be looked at” or “to be spied on.” If one wants to know what it means to be a woman, in the end, they must make use of a male education and lexicon before they can know. A woman has never had her own eyes to observe herself (as a matter of fact, she also doesn’t know the right way to regard herself, she has never had her own mode of consciousness). She must always pass through a man’s vision to face herself and start to reflect on herself and perceive things intuitively.7
As such, while men may not have complete autonomy as agents of their own lives, they
still carry more status than women, who have neither status nor the means to create this
private space. Returning to the “room of one’s own,” she writes that this, “‘[R]oom’ as a
concept not only possesses a material quality, it also becomes a metaphor with
formidable symbolic meaning, indicating all of the biased and unjust treatment which
women bear in society.”8 In the end, Xu Kun wants to see the creation of a new world
where men and women both have access to “rooms of their own,” without being asked
about their gender. As discussed previously, this insistence on individuality apart from
gender is what highlights the project of these female writers’ fiction as that of writing the
si-private self.9
In addition to commenting on her own creation of self in her writing as well as the
need for women to have a private space where they can write, Xu Kun also speaks at
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length about the effect of history and the role of feminism in relation to women’s bodies.
She is particularly concerned with the absence of great female literary masters from the
canon of Chinese literature, and as she notes above, the idea that women cannot or do not
write great works of fiction. For her, the root of the problem is the ways in which women
have been written out of history, literary or otherwise, and written over by patriarchal
culture. As she says:
They (male writers) have all intentionally omitted all of the great female masters from the historical records. On the one hand, they have painstakingly defined our female gender as “the secondary sex” and made us be conscious of ourselves as women, while on the other hand they do not permit us to our female voices to speak. When a woman wants to make her voice heard in the midst of patriarchal culture, she must use male writing, follow the customs of male thinking, and use the male gaze to understand and depict this world. Over the course of time, in our writing our female identity has gradually faded from our memory, and when we open our mouths to speak, in the end our voices have become imitations of men’s raucous voices. In this way women have accepted pressure of the mechanisms of patriarchal aesthetics, and in the middle of an existence based on writing find it very difficult to shoulder the burdens of their own fragmented selves.10
Xu Kun highlights patriarchal culture and male dominance as the very reason why
women have difficulty articulating themselves as complete subjects, because not only
does patriarchal culture keep women in a secondary position to men, but it also denies
them the means to voice their own forms of experience. Because women have no choice
but to write using men’s words, men’s modes of thinking, and men’s literary customs
there can be no real change in the status of women as the secondary producers of culture,
as gendered or partial subjects, for as Audre Lorde reminds us, “The master’s tools will
never dismantle the master’s house.”11
Moreover, Xu Kun goes on to discuss that while feminism provides some
solutions to this predicament, in the end it too has its problems. She writes:
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How can feminism be “done12”? Every woman who has had to go out to take care of business is a latent feminist, just as our status as women cannot be feigned, nor can she drive it off, even if we were beaten to death we would not turn into men. And even more so, however, it also can provide another way solution, that is, the cultural “Mulan Situation,” that is because of patriarchal culture’s unyielding pattern of training and influence, that we can thus put on stage makeup and perform a man’s role. Generally speaking, women who are able to reach the highest levels of culture all have identical fates in the end, that is, after falling into such a pattern of conformity they become products which have been imprinted by the mechanisms (of patriarchal culture) and are adjusted to that kind of uniformity.13
Here Xu Kun describes one of the possible “traps” of feminism, and specifically the
state-sponsored feminism so often critiqued by other theorists such as Dai Jinhua and Li
Xiaojiang. Though women have been “liberated,” according to state-sponsored
feminism, nothing has changed about their inherent status as gendered subjects. The
most that women can hope for is what Xu Kun calls a “Mulan Situation,” where they
begin to act like men. However this does nothing to change the fact that they are not
men, and the underlying patriarchal system which has put women in this secondary social
position to begin with, rather, it simply reinscribes the superiority of masculine culture.
And while, Xu Kun notes, some women do reach positions of power, they do so by
adjusting themselves to this power dynamic rather than by challenging it. We can draw
the same conclusion about state-sponsored feminism from Xu Kun’s commentary that
Meng Yue has about the trajectory of representations in modern Chinese literature:
women appear to be more mobile and the system of patriarchal domination appears to
have weakened while actually it has simply become more difficult to see that women are
still in a secondary position.
At the same time that Xu Kun points out the problems with state-sponsored
feminism and the ways that it subtly reaffirms patriarchal culture, especially in regards to
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women’s writing, she also points out another problem with feminism: that it places an
unnecessary amount of importance on the “femaleness” of women as well, as she says,
“Feminism here sounds too much like a derogatory term!”14 Again and again in her
writing, like the other female avant-garde writers as well, Xu Kun makes it quite clear
that her goal in writing is not to draw attention to her femaleness per se, but rather to
create a space for self-creation. As such, while she has been greatly influenced by
feminist theory, and while her motivations for writing are very much in line with the
feminist project, she would not necessarily call herself a feminist. Rather, this discussion
of women’s historical bodies has particular relevance to her own development as a writer,
as will be discussed later. Taken together, it becomes clear from Xu Kun’s essays and
theoretical writings that what motivates her is a concern about women’s ability to
determine the meaning of their own bodies, as well as the knowledge that only when
women have a space for themselves can they write themselves as individuals separate
from the pre-determined meaning of their gender identity. In order to better understand
how Xu Kun creates this space of self, this space of si-privacy, I turn to now to her
fiction.
Self-Writing and the Theoretical Body: The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring
As previously discussed, Xu Kun focuses on the relationship between women’s
writing, in particular the way that women are able to represent themselves in their
writing, and patriarchal culture in Notes from My Life. Again and again she returns to the
conflict she sees between male-authored history and women’s writing, and in particular
the way that women have been excluded from the literary canon. She writes:
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Women are missing from history, and also essentially missing from literary history. In literature, representations of women are all created by men; from their quality of their external appearance to the shape of their interior being, the male writer’s pen determines and controls all of it. The sporadic women who appear in history also lack enough accounts (of them) and attention (paid to them); there is a lack of female masters. The so-called, “women’s writing style” is also viewed and determined according to male aesthetics. We still don’t know what a genuine “woman’s way of thinking” is, what produces women’s desire and in the end how it is represented; all along we can only adopt the style of writing of male masters to regard and spy on (ourselves). Besides the men placed at the fore by history, women’s history, including the life stories of individuals as they matured and the course of their emotional development as well as how they both came to desire as well as the methods they used to mediate that desire, have basically been unable to achieve expression in literature.15
Not only is this exclusion that she describes important to understanding her motivation in
writing Notes on My Life, but also to understanding the differences between it and her
self-referential novel The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring. In Notes from My Life, the self
that Xu Kun presents is her public self, Xu Kun the writer and theorist. Of the sixty-six
essays included in Notes from My Life, at least eighteen of them focus in a major way on
her own development and experiences as a writer, compared to ten which focus in one
way or another on feminism and eight which focus on love and family relationships,
either hers or those of women in general. Taken together, these thirty-six essays make up
slightly more than half of all of the essays in the collection. Again and again she returns
to the forces which have shaped her as a writer; she spends a great amount of time
thanking the various editors (all male) and presses which helped her to make a name for
herself early on in her career, as well as talking about the various awards she has received
and conferences she has attended. She also mentions the comparison often made between
her work and Wang Shuo’s, remarking that she finds it a bit humorous.16 The common
thread which binds all of these various essays together is her central position. This
repeated insistence on her public self, her struggles and achievements, brings to mind
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Smith and Watson’s definition of autobiography discussed in Chapter I as, “the self-
interested individual intent on assessing the status of the soul or the meaning of public
achievement,”17 as well as Gramsci’s notion of the autobiography as narrating one
person’s unique story in order to speak on behalf of or to reflect the common experiences
of a group of people—Xu Kun, the extraordinary female writer, as representative of all
female writers, etc. While Notes from My Life is not an autobiography per se, but rather a
generic form which is much more similar to a memoir,18 nevertheless the same impulse
towards the creation of a public persona that exists in the autobiographical form also is
present in Notes from My Life. It is clear from the amount of time that Xu Kun spends
discussing her development as a writer that she is engaged in a project of self-reflection,
on the nature and meaning of her literary career, as well as justifying her status as a writer
of note, regardless of her gender. Moreover, it is also clear in discussing her own history,
and in representing herself the way she does—as a highly educated theorist and highly
accomplished author—that she is also arguing for the inclusion of other women writers in
the canon, that is, making herself into a representative for other women (writers) who
have gone unnoticed or less-than-noticed. In the telling of these moments from her life
we can see the reflection of a myriad of other women’s lives, as Gramsci, suggests, “By
narrating it, one creates this possibility, suggests the process, indicates the opening.” 19
As such, the self that Xu Kun narrates in Notes from My Life should be read as her public
self, in contrast to the si-private self that she creates in The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring.
Before turning to Xu Kun’s self-referential novel The Twenty-Two Nights of
Spring, however, it is useful to look at yet another of her self-referential works, and the
subject of one of the longest essays in Notes from My Life—her play Men’s Feelings,
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Women’s Feelings. Written in 2005 and performed in 2006, the play tells the story of a
married man who falls in love with another woman and begins an extramarital affair,
which is later discovered by his wife. They divorce, and the man marries his new love.
After some time, the man again falls in love outside of his marriage and again divorces.
The plot centers on this triangle: the man and his two wives, the former and the current.
In her play as well as other writing, Xu Kun’s views on gender, society, and patriarchal
culture are always present, even if they are not the main topic of discussion. She writes:
I have striven to express my reflections about human affairs in this play. What is love? What is marriage? And even more so, in the end, what is life? Everyone might have their own understanding. In the play, the leading man marries, has an extramarital affair, divorces, marries again, has another extramarital affair, and once again has to deal with the trouble of divorce…he is never able to attain satisfaction, as if he is always living in some other place. Moreover, the two women in the play, his former wife and the one who currently holds that position, ultimately their goal is the hope for love that will be loyal through thick and thin and a happy family. It can be seen that, in marriage, men’s needs and women’s needs are not completely identical. In the play, the man’s behavior causes the women’ to become completely disappointed. They realize if trying to make a man remain faithful to his principles is as difficult as getting a dog to not chew on bones. Because gnawing on bones is a dog’s nature.20
Much like in The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring, it is relationships between men and
women that form the basis for this play. Like the other female avant-garde writers, these
relationships are portrayed as being inherently damaging to women, although certainly
not to the same extent that some of the other writers represent them. For Xu Kun, a
woman’s relationship with a man is as damaging to her selfhood as patriarchal culture is
to women’s writing. She is always the “secondary” member in the relationship, subject
to the whims of her husband. When he leaves, as Xu Kun says that he eventually will,
she loses her hopes of having the one thing she has wanted, while the only consequences
for him are the troubles associated with divorce.
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In addition, as in much of her writing, much of her inspiration came from her own
personal life and experiences. As she says:
It is possible to make out traces and shadows of my personal life experiences and emotions in the characters, plot, and story of the play. Even though I myself once suffered the loss of a marriage, when it comes to my beliefs about life, on the whole I am a cultural conservative. I still yearn for that kind of classical love where “treating one’s spouse with respect” and “growing old together hand in hand” is the foundation. In today’s era of diversity and the emphasis on individual freedom and the excessive expressions of self, this kind of opinion might seem unrealistic and even a little outdated, but toward those families and people who can be faithful in a loving marriage, I still want to extend my highest praises and express my feelings of respect and admiration.21
Although she admits that she longs for an “old-fashioned” relationship, and also implies
that perhaps there has been too much of a turn toward individual freedom in
contemporary society, this does not necessarily clash with her desire to create a private
self in her other works of self-referential fiction. The “shadows” of herself that appear in
Men’s Feelings, Women’s Feelings and the self that she creates in The Twenty-Two
Nights of Spring are not the same; her own experiences and emotions have become the
raw material form which she draws inspiration, however as she notes, it is not her
intention to narrate herself in the work, either public or private, but rather to look at the
nature of heterosexual relationships, to raise questions about love and human nature.
However, understanding her feelings about relationships between men and women is
important for understanding The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring.
In The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring we meet Mao Zhen, whose life often closely
parallels Xu Kun’s own life. It is told largely in the third person, and except for the
occasional “slip” into first person narration, Xu Kun makes no attempts to portray the
interior thoughts or feelings of any of the other characters besides Mao Zhen—the novel
is totally focused on her and her mental and emotional development. While it is set
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during a two-year span from 1999 to 2001, in developing Mao Zhen’s story, Xu Kun
spends a great deal of time describing events that began in 1986 when Mao Zhen came to
Beijing for the first time, and the subsequent ten or so years. The novel opens on the last
night of 1999, with Mao Zhen going to her friend-and-sometime-collaborator’s home for
dinner. This friend, Pangda Gu’ai, is a television director, and has, from time to time,
asked Mao Zhen to write for him. By the end of the evening they wind up in bed
together, and thus begin a relationship. It also causes Mao Zhen to reminisce on her life
up to that point, and the years that have passed since she had first come to Beijing. She
remembers first coming to Beijing in 1986 with her then boyfriend Chen Misong. At the
time they were both college students in Shenyang, just about to graduate. When they go
back to Shenyang, Mao Zhen starts graduate school while Chen Misong moves to Beijing
to work. Two years later they marry and Mao Zhen moves to Beijing. By 1996 she has
started to make a name for herself as a writer and he is growing busier and busier with his
work at the publishing house, and in 1999 they divorce, just as she is about to finish her
doctorate. The period after her divorce is a very difficult one for her, and she considers
suicide as an option. That is until she meets Pangda Gu’ai, a charming older man who is
himself divorced. He sweeps her off her feet, and she begins to heal from her
relationship with Chen Misong. He even proposes to her, and the two start to discuss a
possible marriage; she even broaches the topic of having a child with him. Around the
same time she also meets one of Pangda Gu’ai’s friends, a businessman named Wang
Xinquan. As their friendship develops, he expresses an interest in Mao Zhen, which she
does not return because of her relationship with Pangda Gu’ai. In the end, however, she
discovers that Pangda Gu’ai has several lovers, and she leaves him, eventually choosing
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to move in with Wang. It is during her relationship with Wang that she finally feels her
growing sense of independence come to maturity, and despite being in a fairly
comfortable relationship, Mao Zhen eventually leaves and decides to live on her own.
The novel ends with her choosing to live alone, and continuing to work towards building
her professional career.
There is a lot of Xu Kun’s own life in The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring. Both Xu
Kun and Mao Zhen attended university and graduate school in Shenyang from 1982 to
1989, and then begin doctoral studies in Beijing in 1996. Both Xu Kun and Mao Zhen
were married in 1988 and divorced in 1999. Both use writing as a means to get through
this difficult period in their lives, and both often talk about the pleasures and difficulties
of living as a single woman. Even the hesitation that Mao Zhen’s parents express when
she tells them of her plan to marry Chen Misong echoes the reservations that Xu Kun’s
parents expressed at her own marriage, and which she discusses in Notes from My Life.22
She also makes several references to her other writing in the novel; for example Mao
Zhen’s book, Damn Soccer (Gaisi de zuqiu), has nearly the same title as one of Xu Kun’s
works, Fucking Soccer (Gouri de zuqiu);23 similarly, one of the letters that Mao Zhen
writes to her friend Ah Zhen is actually the final paragraph of one of Xu Kun’s essays
written to her friend Li Hongzhen.24 Like Xu Kun, Mao Zhen is considered to be an
avant-garde writer, although in the novel Mao Zhen remarks that this was the result of her
housing situation at the time, “Later, people also said that her writing style was very
avant-garde, very modern. Actually, they didn’t know that this was the result of having
to hold her bladder in the block-style housing—her normal train of thought and the flow
of her thinking was completely broken by the need to pee.”25 However, unlike the public
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self that she presents in Notes from My Life, the Xu Kun that is reflected in Mao Zhen is
inward-looking character, an individual self who comes into her own despite the confines
of her relationships with men. And like the fictional selves of the other avant-garde
female writers, Mao Zhen chooses a life that is not bounded by her socially-defined role
as a woman; although perhaps less radical in her choices that those of Lin Bai’s Lin
Duomi and Chen Ran’s Ni Niuniu, for example, nevertheless, her eventual choice to live
as an independent woman represents a form of resistance to patriarchal cultures definition
of what a woman, “should be.”
Mao Zhen’s development is both slow and painful, and the process of learning
about herself and becoming the agent of her own life is not a fast one. From the vantage
point of her first night with Pangda Gu’ai, with her divorce to Chen Misong only recently
finalized, Mao Zhen begins thinking back on her relationship history and what has
brought her to this point. She remembers when she was in college, and how by the end of
their first year all of her female classmates were already looking for boyfriends. It was
around this time that she herself met Chen Misong. As she recalls this period in her life,
she also remembers what happened to the girls who were not successful in finding
boyfriends for themselves, saying, “By the time they had reached their fourth year of
college, those girls who still didn’t have any boys chasing after them commonly began to
feel a certain sense of inferiority and anxiety well up inside them, and they often became
a bit strange.”26 While not a part of her own experiences at that point in her life, Mao
Zhen’s memory of these girls indicates just how great an effect patriarchal culture has
had these young women, that their ability to judge their own self-worth is directly
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connected to their ability to attract a man. For Mao Zhen this question also becomes very
personally important later in her own development as well.
It also sets the foundation for the Xu Kun’s own reflections on the damaging
effect of the socially-defined relationships between men and women on women, a theme
common to all of the avant-garde women writers. Early in her marriage to Chen Misong,
Mao Zhen defines herself in relationship to her husband. He is the leader, and she, the
follower. She defers to him in terms of decision-making as well as in terms of his
desire—he is described as being the initiator in all cases but one. The one time that she
does take the lead in their sexual relationship is when she goes with Chen Misong to visit
his parents after their wedding. The next morning she is reproached, albeit subtly, by
both Chen Misong and his mother for keeping him from getting enough sleep. She takes
exception to this, angry that she should be reproached for initiating what she considers
normal behavior between two recently-married people. In this incident, it is possible to
make out traces of the inequalities of expectations placed on men and women; Xu Kun
implies that male desire is the active element while female desire should be passive and
yielding. This episode is particularly telling in light of her earlier novella Nü Wa, in
which the destructive relationship between a mother-in-law, Popo, and daughter-in-law,
Yu’er, directly affects four generations of the Yu family. This relationship is toxic to all
involved precisely because of the traditionally defined roles for men and women, with
men as the active initiators of desire and women as the passive receptacles, saddled with
the burden of bringing that male desire to fruition by producing a child. Coupled with the
fact that traditionally a woman’s only access to power within the family, generally
speaking, came through her husband or sons, there is an inherent tension built into this
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kind of triangular relationship, a tension which is not absent from Mao Zhen’s marriage,
although it is significantly less than that which the characters in Nü Wa experience.
Mao Zhen also experiences a certain amount of loss of her identity after her
marriage to Chen Misong as well. While she does eventually decide that she wants to
make a name for herself as a writer, the idea of pursuing her own fame is only mentioned
briefly from time to time throughout the course of the novel. Rather, it is Mao Zhen’s
journey from a naïve young woman who defines herself by the men in her life to the
independent, more mature writer that she becomes in her thirties that is of interest to Xu
Kun. One of the first moments in this process of growth comes for Mao Zhen after she
and Chen Misong move into their first apartment of their own. It was arranged for them
by Misong’s work unit, and is mostly populated by his male coworkers; there are very
few other women there. In this atmosphere, Mao Zhen completely loses her identity to
Chen Misong; while she often spends time playing mahjongg with Chen Misong and
some of the other men in the building, she is never given an identity, or even a name,
which is hers alone, rather, she is always an extension of her husband. As Xu Kun
describes, “At that time, with them, she practically had no name. She had lived with
these people in this Communist-style block housing for so many years and yet basically
no one knew her name. They called her ‘Chen Misong’s wife’ if they were being slightly
more respectful; or ‘Chen Misong’s lover,’ etc. if they didn’t know any better. She lived
in this unit’s block housing and lost her name.”27 At the time, Mao Zhen doesn’t seem to
mind too much, although the more mature Mao Zhen who remembers these events
betrays a certain amount of dissatisfaction with this situation.
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One of the most important events in Mao Zhen’s development as a subject comes
in 1991 when she and many of the other recently graduated graduate students are sent to
the countryside for a year for training. While she is there, Mao Zhen not only becomes
stronger physically, but also linguistically, learning how to speak quickly and forcefully
like her other female compatriots. This new ability is one that she brings back to Beijing
with her, and one which serves her well in her quest to make a name for herself as a
writer. She is able to keep up with her male counterparts, and becomes known for her
forceful writing-style, much like the real Xu Kun. She also returns to Beijing with a
newfound sense of purpose, and a new sense of independence and self-reliance. She has
decided, and is determined, to make a name for herself as a writer. Xu Kun writes,
“When she came back, she seemed to have become like a different person, hardworking,
diligent, not fond of playing around. Heavy pressure piled up on her heart. She spent the
whole day reading and writing. Every day, except for making food for Chen Misong,
washing clothes, and a few other times, she ran to the library and didn’t come back until
the evening, writing well into the night.”28 However, despite her newfound ambition,
Mao Zhen still continues to perform her duties as wife—cooking, cleaning, and doing the
laundry—for Chen Misong, who is also very intent on making a name for himself, and is
himself writing a book. It is only later, when they are both so busy with their work that
Mao Zhen has stopped performing this role that their marriage begins to break down.
Once again, Xu Kun draws the reader’s attention to the inequalities that exist within
heterosexual relationships, and pressures that still exist for women within patriarchal
culture, however liberated or enlightened it (and they) have become. It is only in being
removed from this situation, in this case, sent to the countryside and surrounded only by
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other female compatriots, that Mao Zhen begins to grow into an individual subject in her
own right.
Despite her new sense of self, Mao Zhen has not completely developed an identity
of her own, and still relies on the men in her life for validation. This becomes
particularly relevant after her divorce from Chen Misong; she goes through a period of
deep depression, and feels that she is no longer able to like, or even trust, herself. She
suddenly gains a lot of weight and begins to question her body’s ability to produce
children, and goes to the doctor for a complete physical. She is relieved to learn that she
is capable of having children, and soon her weight returns to normal. Shortly thereafter,
she meets Pangda Gu’ai, and begins her relationship with him; although there is a lot
about him that she doesn’t particularly like, and he does not make the best companion or
partner for her—he is often very selfish, and set in his ways, living the life of a confirmed
bachelor—she still allows herself to proceed with him, because at this point in her
journey to selfhood, she still needs this kind of male attention to feel complete. Xu Kun
describes Mao Zhen, saying, “At this time, during the confused period where her self-
confidence had already been completely destroyed, knowing that there was someone
thinking of her, who liked her, for the person that she was then this was so important, so
important! That feeling really was completely unforgettable.”29 In fact the turning point
does not completely begin for Mao Zhen until after Pangda Gu’ai has broken her heart,
and Mao Zhen is trying to pull herself together. After they separate, Mao Zhen gets very
sick. After a few days, however, she has started to recover, and she decides that it is time
for her to take her fate into her own hands. Xu Kun writes:
A week later, when her high fever had gone down and her strength had returned, she purposefully climbed off her bed and, facing her mirror, got dressed up and
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put on makeup. She said to herself in the mirror: you’re not too old yet; she had to say to herself: you’re not so hard on the eyes; she still yet needed to tell herself: even though you’ve been married once, there’s no reason people should look down on you—if you hadn’t been married by your age it would be really shameful.30
Mao Zhen has decided to pursue Wang Xinquan, who had previously expressed his
interest in her, although at that time she was still seeing Pangda Gu’ai and therefore was
unable, and uninterested, in returning his advances. In this moment, Mao Zhen has
turned the corner in her own development as a subject. She finally is facing herself,
looking at herself, rather than being the object of her male partner’s gaze. She does not
berate herself for being unable to keep her partner, or despair at the prospect of being
alone, but rather encourages herself. However, she is still in the process of coming into
full possession of herself, and so the reference to her acceptability as a woman still uses
patriarchal culture’s expectations for her as a guide, that is, she marry, although even this
hold on her is beginning to weaken somewhat.
After giving herself this bit of encouragement, Mao Zhen calls Wang Xinquan
and arranges to meet him for dinner, and they begin a relationship, her final one in the
novel. Unlike her relationship with Chen Misong, which was based on love, and her
relationship with Pangda Gu’ai which started with lust, Mao Zhen’s relationship with
Wang Xinquan is one of convenience. They enjoy each other’s company, and are good
friends, and Mao Zhen moves in quite quickly. This goes on until one day when Mao
Zhen gets a phone call from Wang Xinquan’s former girlfriend, who begs Mao Zhen to
leave him. His former girlfriend explains that she needs Xinquan, and that she will be
good to him, and asks Mao Zhen to give him up, saying that she knows that Mao Zhen
will be okay on her own. Faced with this situation, Mao Zhen finally decides that she has
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had enough of men and prefers to live on her own; she then moves out, back to her old
apartment. Although this choice is not ideal, for Mao Zhen it is the only possible choice
to be made after her experiences with Chen Misong, Pangda Gu’ai, and Wang Xinquan.
Xu Kun writes:
When she was alone with herself, she also wasn’t completely happy. “A room of one’s own” isn’t enough on its own to provide happiness; one needs people in that room who give them love before they can be happy. “I belong to myself” also isn’t happiness, and simply isn’t sustainable. People cannot live only for themselves, and if they do, sooner or later they will find that they have been living an empty life, living an inane life. She would always want to live for someone else before she herself would feel somewhat alive. Otherwise, she might lose her life…. But she understood that they were all sick, Pangda Gu’ai and Wang Xinquan—those successful people from the capital who looked so shiny, so slick on the outside—their sickness was deeper than hers. No matter what she could still hold on to some things, while they, however, threw themselves out completely. This cycle of behavior became ever deeper, ever more of a trap. Maybe it was because she was merely at the beginning, while they had already been trapped here for so long, too long; they had already cultivated a kind of indiscriminant inertia. She and them, they were all sick people. Sick people cannot seek stability from other sick people. They should all wait for the arrival of a healthy person to give them some stability. She should also learn patience in waiting for that healthy person to come and help bring some stability to herself.31
While Mao Zhen admits to herself that she will always want to live for someone else, that
her life will always be incomplete without someone else in her “room of her own,” she
also acknowledges that the kinds of relationships that she has had with these men are not
healthy, for her or for them. And although the path that she takes to discovering how
unhealthy these relationships are is different from both Lin Bai’s and Hai Nan’s
protagonists, Mao Zhen’s realization of the damaging effects that heterosexual
relationships have for women and her choice to live a solitary existence is one of the
aspects which makes The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring a work of resistance, and one of
the ways in which Xu Kun creates for Mao Zhen a space of si-privacy in the novel.
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In addition to this, Xu Kun’s depictions of Mao Zhen’s sexual development also
reinforce the si-private self that she creates in The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring, as well
as mirror her development into an autonomous subject. Her first sexual experiences are
with Chen Misong, after they have arrived in Beijing for the first time in 1986. Away
from home and alone together for the first time, they still must work to “steal” some time
with each other. Their first sexual encounter is a clandestine one, as they are afraid of
being caught by the other couples that they have traveled to Beijing with. And in the
midst of her first hurried sexual experience, it is Chen Misong’s passion which leads Mao
Zhen, rather than her own. Xu Kun writes of Mao Zhen’s experience that, “She felt him
with her body, smothering her, gasping for breath; two young, immature bodies who had
not yet learned resentment, desperately trying to stick as closely together as possible,
chaotically rushing towards each other, chaotically pushing together, hating that they
cannot press the other one’s life out. What he feels, she feels. When he trembles, she
trembles.”32 He is the active agent in this sexual encounter, and while Mao Zhen also
feels desire, it is mostly in response to his desire. He wants to enter her, and she
acquiesces. He first feels the pleasure of her body, and then she feels pleasure. And
because these meetings are surreptitious, their early sexual history is marked by the sense
that they are doing something shameful, and a certain amount of insecurity on Mao
Zhen’s part.
Their furtive meetings continue after this until they are finally married. At this
point, the feelings of shame and insecurity melt away, as their sexual relationship has
been sanctified by the bonds of matrimony. Xu Kun describes their wedding night,
saying:
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In the hotel room, they could finally face each other completely naked. This was the time they had looked forward to for so long, the first time they could clearly look at each other’s bodies, open and aboveboard, leisurely enjoying the sight of gazing at each other’s bodies, a body of the opposite sex. Muscles, frame, hair, blood. This was the first time…. Now, this layer of mystery could finally be open and aboveboard, open and legally revealed!33
Mao Zhen is finally able to take a more active role in the relationship—she can gaze at
him just as he gazes at her; now that their relationship has been made into one which
meets social requirements for legitimacy, she is free to express her desire. However, as
mentioned above, Mao Zhen is not completely free to act on her desire, as she is
reprimanded by her mother-in-law for keeping Chen Misong from getting his proper
sleep. Despite the legitimacy of marriage, Xu Kun still hints at the dangers of female
desire, and points out that Mao Zhen is still expected to be passive to her husband’s
desire rather than actively act on her own. This is a very difficult lesson her for, and she
in understandably angry that this kind of attitude still exists even in the current day and
age. It is also the last mention of Mao Zhen’s sexual relationship with Chen Misong,
although Xu Kun does hint that as their respective lives become busier and busier, that
Mao Zhen and Chen Misong stop being intimate altogether, and that this may have been a
factor in their divorce.
The next mention of Mao Zhen’s sexuality, rather, comes while she is in the
countryside working. It is the first time she makes close female friends; previously Xu
Kun tells the reader how Mao Zhen dislikes spending time with women, because they are
not as direct and straight-forward as men, and that Mao Zhen finds it much more
pleasurable to spend time with Chen Misong and his colleagues in their housing complex,
playing mahjongg. Once she is sent to the countryside, however, Mao Zhen is
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surrounded by women, and for the first time in her life develops very close female
friendships. And while Xu Kun never goes so far as to define these friendships as
explicitly homosexual, she does imply a certain degree of homosociality. For example,
when describing Mao Zhen’s relationship with her friend Ah Zhen, Xu Kun writes,
“They became practically inseparable. In today’s vocabulary, they had certain
‘Comrade’ or homosexual inclinations. But at that time, what did they understand about
messing around for fun? They didn’t understand. Their friendship was as pure as the
moonlight in the countryside, big and round, without the slightest impurity.”34 Rather
than the sweaty, surreptitious fumblings of her “illicit” sexual relationship with Chen
Misong prior to her marriage, or the completely exposed relationship that they have after
their marriage, Mao Zhen’s relationship with Ah Zhen is made only partially visible to
the reader, left in a borderland space that exists between friendship and physical desire, a
space which Xu Kun describes as innocent and pure. And it is here that, like the other
female avant-garde writers, Xu Kun uses this alternative form of female sexuality to
create a space of si-privacy in the novel.
This relationship, whatever it may ultimately have been, does not continue as
anything other than a close friendship after Mao Zhen returns to Beijing from the
countryside. However, as previously noted, Mao Zhen returns a new woman, with a
newfound sense of determination. She also remains quite close with Ah Zhen, relying on
her friend for strength during her divorce from Chen Misong. After the divorce, Mao
Zhen feels as though her body has died—she no longer feels any desire, either sexual or
otherwise. In fact it is not until she meets Pangda Gu’ai that her desire is rekindled. On
the night when he has invited her over to his house for dinner, Pangda Gu’ai at one point
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remarks that Mao Zhen isn’t very womanly; while he means it in a complimentary way,
she takes offense, and tries to leave. Determined to make amends, Pangda Gu’ai
convinces her to stay, and the two begin to drink quite heavily. When she gets up to look
at one of his books, he moves to help her reach it from a high shelf, and Mao Zhen finds
that her body misses the feeling of another body. Xu Kun writes:
A big pair of hands, warm, wrapping around her waist from behind. She moved the nape of her neck backwards, exploring—regular puffs of hot breath. The smell of an unfamiliar man. The smell of alcohol. Tentatively stroking her hair, saying nothing. A huge body sticking close to her, a virile and powerful body, burning hot, stuck close behind her, his heart frantically pounding “dong dong dong dong,” for a second, with each beat, pounding against her heart, her chest also burning hot, as though it were being fried. A thousand, tens of thousands of red hot ants tickled him, moved from his hands to her body…she tried to dodge them, instinctively tried to dodge them, afraid his stubble might scratch her, and raised her hands to ward him off. In doing so, she felt his hands and found that they were covered in soft, fine hair.35
It is interesting to note the way in which Xu Kun narrates Mao Zhen’s desire. After the
first bodily memory of what it is to be near a man, Mao Zhen also remembers the
dangerous feeling of heterosexual desire; much like Chen Misong’s desire threatened to
smother her, so too does the pounding of Pangda Gu’ai’s heart. It is not until she brushes
his hands (trying to get away from him), and feels how like her own hands they are that
she finally gives in to her own desire, and to him. Unlike Lin Duomi in Lin Bai’s fiction,
no explicit mention of female autoerotic desire is ever made in The Twenty-Two Nights of
Spring, however it is clear from her sudden change in disposition that it is precisely this
discovery, that his hands are like hers, that turns her apprehension into arousal. Her
relationship with Pangda Gu’ai is also her most sexually free; Xu Kun most frequently
portrays Mao Zhen, not Pangda, as the initiator of their sexual encounters. This parallels
Mao Zhen’s development as a subject; as she becomes more and more of an individual
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agent of her own life, so too is she more able to actively able to pursue her desire. She is
not completely free, as she is a little embarrassed leaving Pangda Gu’ai’s house the next
morning to run into any of his neighbors, however compared to her relationship with
Chen Misong, Mao Zhen is far more able to act on her own wishes and desires. And just
as her choice to live a solitary life is one way that Xu Kun creates a space of si-privacy in
her fiction, in narrating Mao Zhen’s desire as active rather than passive as well as taking
other forms beyond social convention, Xu Kun reinforces this si-private space as one of
resistance, and one which is only partially transparent to the reading public.
Conclusion
Despite the relatively conventional nature of the content in Xu Kun’s work, it is
interesting to see that like the more graphic One Person’s War, The Twenty-Two Nights
of Spring is also criticized for its lack of literary value. Online commentator Yiyan Wang
writes:
The story takes too much from the author's life, and is therefore limited by reality. The emotional significance of similar events in Xu Kun's personal life limits her creativity, allowing it to be superseded by excessively subjective characterization and plot. The appeal of the text is consequently limited to readers familiar with and interested in the author's life.36
Returning to Xu Kun’s previous comments in Notes from My Life, because of the
expectations of patriarchal culture, the kind of story that she narrates in The Twenty-Two
Nights of Spring is not one which is likely to gain her acceptance into the lists of literary
masters. As Wang points out, the context of The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring is too
personal, too subjective. Moreover, Wang claims that this subjective stance limits Xu
Kun’s creativity to a mere representation of events that had actually taken place.
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However, it is possible to make out the shadow of Xu Kun’s successful creation of a si-
private space from within Wang’s critique. In being “excessively subjective,” The
Twenty-Two Nights of Spring actually presents a world that the reading public can only
partially enter, only partially consume. Xu Kun, rather, has created a space in which she
has successfully narrated a self, a self that has had many of the same experiences as the
author, but whom we cannot say for sure is the author herself. Rather, The Twenty-Two
Nights of Spring resists a historical or social reading, and shies away from the more
public-oriented subject matter of Notes from My Life. As such, despite its more moderate
stance relative to the works of some of the other avant-garde female writers, it is clear
that The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring should be read through the lens of si-privacy,
while Notes from My Life should be read as a work oriented toward public recognition.
Notes 1 Xu Kun 徐坤, Wode rensheng biji (我的人生笔记 Notes on My Life), 104. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine and remain as close to Xu Kun’s original wording as possible. 2 Specifically, she discusses one of her contemporaries, Qiu Huadong 邱华栋. Like Xu Kun, he began writing in the early 1990s and often on similar problems. She specifically mentions his Private Notebook (私人笔记本) Xu Kun, “Men’s Feelings Women’s Feelings,” (性情男女 Xingqing nan nü) in Sitting to Watch the Clouds as They Rise (坐看云起时 Zuo kan yun qi shi), 71.
3 Xu Kun, “Men’s Feelings, Women’s Feelings,” in Beijing and North (北京以北 Beijing yi bei), 74. 4 Xu Kun, “Remembering the Age of Handwritten Drafts,” (怀念手稿时代 Huainian shougao shidai) in Notes on My Life, 71-73; Lin Bai, One Person’s War, 10. 5 Xu Kun, “A Room of One’s Own,” (一间自己的屋子 Yijian ziji de wuzi) in Notes on My Life, 202.
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6 Xu Kun, “The Exhaustion of Gender,” (性别之累 Xingbie zhi lei) in Notes on My Life, 150. 7 Xu Kun, “Who Is the ‘King’ and Who Is the ‘Concubine’?” (谁是“霸王”谁是“姬”？ Shei shi ‘Ba Wang’ shei shi ‘’ji’?) in Notes on My Life, 159. The title of this essay is an allusion to Farewell My Concubine (Ba wang bie ji) from the Han Dynasty and Peking Opera, not to be confused with the novel by Lilian Lee or the film directed by Chen Kaige. 8 Xu Kun, “A Room of One’s Own,” 203. 9 See the discussion of feminism in the introduction; while grounded in feminism, I argue that these writers resist being labeled as feminist writers because of the corresponding insistence on gendered female identity. This is particularly important for Xu Kun, and is addressed below. 10 Xu Kun, “The Exhaustion of Gender,” 151. 11 Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Reina Lewis and Sarah Mills ed. Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, (New York: Routledge, 2003), 27. 12 In the performative sense; the Chinese word here is 搞.
13 Xu Kun, “Li Hongzhen: Tonight Let’s Go Have a Drink,” (李红真：今晚出喝一杯 Li Hongzhen: Jinwan chu he yibei) in Notes from My Life, 123. 14 Xu Kun, “Li Hongzhen: Tonight Let’s Go Have a Drink,” 123. 15 Xu Kun, Notes from My Life, 191. 16 Xu Kun, “Me and China Writer Magazine,” (我与《中国作家》 Wo yu Zhongguo zuojia) in Notes from My Life, 68. 17 Smith and Watson, 2 18 The Notes on My Life (rensheng biji 人生笔记) form is itself a genre of writing in the Chinese literary canon, with its own long history. See Chapter One. 19 Gramsci, 132. 20 Xu Kun, “How I Came to Write a Play,” (我是怎样写起话剧的 Wo shi zenyang xie qi huaju de) in Notes from My Life, 101. 21 Xu Kun, “How I Came to Write a Play,” 102. 22 Xu Kun, “Little Twinges of Anger,” (小愤情 Xiao fen qing) in Notes from My Life, 27-28.
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23 Xu Kun, The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring (春天的二十二个夜晚 Chuntian de ershi’erge yewan), 222. 24 Xu Kun, Xu Kun, “Li Hongzhen: Tonight Let’s Go Have a Drink,” 125 and The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring, 114. 25 Xu Kun, The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring, 91. 26 Xu Kun, The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring, 38. 27 Xu Kun, The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring, 80. 28 Xu Kun, The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring, 86. 29 Xu Kun, The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring, 232. 30 Xu Kun, The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring, 339. 31 Xu Kun, The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring, 371. 32 Xu Kun, The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring, 39. 33 Xu Kun, The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring, 59. 34 Xu Kun, The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring, 84. 35 Xu Kun, The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring, 20. 36 One of the few mentions I have been able to find about The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring, scholarly or otherwise. “Twenty-two Evenings in Spring,” last modified February 2003, http://www.chinatoday.com.cn/English/e2003/e20032/3cu7.htm
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CHAPTER V
SELF-ISH WOMEN: INDIVIDUALIZED WRITING AND PRIVACY IN THE
WORKS OF LIN BAI
“A person’s ability to act in accord with her own conscience depends upon the degree to which she can go beyond the limits imposed by the society in which she lives, to become a citizen of the world. The most important quality she must possess in this is the courage to say no, the courage to refuse to obey the dictates of the powerful to refuse to submit to
the dictates of public opinion.” Chen Ran, A Private Life
Lin Bai was born Lin Baiwei in 1958 in Beiliu, Guangxi Province. She began
writing poetry and a little fiction while in college, from 1978 to 1982. By 1987 some of
her short stories were being published in such magazines as Renmin wenxue and
Shanghai wenxue. In 1989, she won critical acclaim for the short story, “True-Hearted
Lovers Cannot Separate” (“Tongxin lianzhe bu neng fenshou”), and in 1990 she moved
from Guangxi to Beijing. In 1994 she published her novel One Person’s War (Yige ren
de zhanzheng), first in Huacheng magazine, and subsequently in full-length novel form.
This brought Lin Bai into the public eye, as the content of One Person’s War was
denounced as being sexually inappropriate. Eventually she would change both publishers
and the text itself. In 1997, a collection of her works was published, including the
original text of One Person’s War. She continues to write and publish her short stories
and essays. It is in Lin Bai’s work, perhaps more so than any of the other female avant-
garde women writers, that it is possible to see how the self-referential space of si-privacy
is created and functions as a space of resistance, as well as the reading public’s critical
response to it. As Wang Lingzhen notes:
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A whole new set of si terms appeared in analyses of Lin’s autobiographical novel…Although these terms seemed neutral, at least when deployed by literary and cultural critics, the traditional and conventional connotations of the word si, especially when it was exclusively tied to nü (female), strongly invited an illicit imagination and a negative interpretation. She [Lin] cannot have been happy that her Self at War was advertised as (and accused by some critics of being) zhun huangse (quasi-pornographic) and low.1
Given the importance that si plays in the critical response to Lin’s novel, it is necessary
first to look at how she writes herself in another form, that of the Notes from My Life
genre, and then use these two different representations of self to understand how Lin
creates a space of si-privacy in her fiction, and also from where this negative critical
response springs.
The Gold of Previous Incarnations: Notes from My Life
Like Xu Kun, Lin Bai has also written a work in the “Notes from My Life” genre.
The essays in this collection are not organized into sections, nor by any particular theme;
they cover aspects of Lin’s life from the death of her father and her largely absentee
mother to her writing and her development as a writer, and even her feelings on art,
photography, and movies. She speaks often of her parents and her daughter, however,
she only mentions her husband once, in passing.2 Unlike Xu Kun, whose works are a
mixture of history, theory, and the personal, the distinction between Lin’s Notes from My
Life and her self-referential fiction is more blurry, however it is still possible to make out;
that is, in Notes from My Life Lin presents a more public version of herself as a writer,
whereas she preserves her self-referential fiction as a si-private space for self-creation
and self-reflection.
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Lin Bai favors the poetic in her writing. Time and again in her The Gold of
Previous Incarnations: Notes from My Life (hereafter Notes from My Life) she returns to
the subject of poetry to explain her writing and her development as a writer, as well as to
explain how her style of fiction has developed over time. Ultimately, while she enjoys
writing fiction, and often writes of how her fiction is the means by which she eases her
personal anxieties and calms her mind, when it comes to writing, poetry is her first and
truest love. Poetry is that form of writing that comes from the deepest, most personal
places in her inner self. She writes:
Poetry is strange like this. You don’t know when it will appear, but if you are not silent, if you don’t hold some expectation of its coming in your heart, then it will never arrive. And fiction is certainly very noisy, because it is formed from a pile of words inside which stand characters, fates, stories, worlds, and turmoil. It is in another time and space. Poetry however, hangs high above the crown of one’s head, harboring another kind of emotion and intelligence. If fiction is fortunate to intersect with poetry, I think this kind of fiction is both hard to come by and excellent.3
For her, writing in general is a respite from the outside world, and within the space of
writing, poetry is the purest form of expression of the self. It only comes when the writer
is quiet and still—when the writer has looked into their inner self and has made a space
for that poetry to fill. In this sense, for Lin Bai, poetry is the private, personal world of
self-expression that the avant-garde writers are trying to create in their fiction. However,
Lin says, one never knows when that poetry will come and so if the fiction that she writes
is able to share some common features with poetry, then that fiction can serve as a
secondary si-private space. As such, it is never quite as personal or ultimately as
fulfilling as poetry, as she says:
I have been bogged down in fiction for too long, and the road back to poetry is longer and longer. But I have always had an eager attention for poetry, and I will solicitously wait for poetry, no matter whether I write fiction or I don’t. I regard
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poetry as my private place. After twenty years of this superficial poetic career, I am once again a beginner. I will write poetry in the deepest part of the night, but I cannot force those poetic words out. They will always be my secret blossoms; born in the darkness they will actually turn into ashes. This timid emotion is my highest respect for poetry.4
Moreover, for Lin, while her poetry is the most private of all of the literary spaces
that she creates for herself, she sees the boundaries between the various forms, poetry,
prose, novels, and short-stories, as fairly fluid, and she devotes a lot of time to explaining
her views on these various forms in Notes from My Life. To that end, while most of the
essays that she includes in this volume are works of prose, either discussing her feelings
on literature or describing various memories from her past, she also includes some fiction
as well, for example her short story “One Whom I have Long Since Remembered.”
While in general it is clear that Lin values poetry as the highest form of expression, and
that her fiction and prose show a definite inclination toward the poetic in her choice of
language and the way she structures her writing, she regards the difference between the
various generic styles as somewhat superfluous, as she says, “I have a few works of
fiction which some people believe are more like essay-like fiction. So I have plucked out
these few prosodic paragraphs from my fiction, fixed a topic and turned them into a work
of prose. I feel that this is a little like a person changing an article of clothing.”5
Ultimately, since the purpose of all literary creation is self-expression, whether one writes
poetry or prose is of somewhat less importance to Lin. Moreover, each form serves its
own purpose, and has had its own place in her life. In her youth, Lin wrote more poetry,
turning then to short stories and novels, all the while preserving her feelings about poetic
creation. And despite the sense of dissatisfaction or fatigue that pervades some of her
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essays on fiction in Notes from My Life, it is also clear that she is not finished with the
form, and will continue to use it as it suits her in the future. She says:
In all reality, I am a frail person. I don’t beat myself to pieces, and even if I don’t do battle I am still defeated. For this kind of person, writing is not a choice, but rather a kind of predestination. Very early on I started to keep a diary. Words like my dead father and faraway mother, and also like my thick blankets which allow me to block out the world appear from my pen and return to my heart; they become rays of light in my dark inner being. Reality is promptly forgotten, and in my delusion I become big and powerful. Every word holds a sword or halberd in its hand; skillfully, bravely they march forward. How many ferocious enemies have had their throats closed with those swords, how many more will never again receive tender feelings? Proceeding from my own inner self, they pass through words and change into petals falling on my shoulders. They start in my diaries and reach my poetry, and from my poetry reach my fiction. For more than twenty years now writing has already become my way of life.6
One of the main themes that Lin develops in Notes from My Life is her focus on her own
“inner being” (内心 nei xin), and how fiction has become her sole means of expressing,
protecting, and comforting that inner self.
In addition to her discussions of art and literature, her development as a writer and
as a person, and her memories of her family, hometown, and her youth, Lin also
discusses many of the problems faced by women and women writers in society. In this
respect as well, it is clear that Notes from My Life has a more publicly oriented focus than
her fiction and poetry, which remains her own personal space for self-creation. Several
of the essays in Notes from My Life deal with women’s reproductive issues, such as
“Related Words: ‘Getting Rid of It,’ ‘Induced Abortion,’ and ‘Termination,’” in which
she discusses abortion and its implications; in “The Origin of Cold Sweats,” she writes
about menstruation, and in “Women’s Youth,” she talks about the pressures that women
face in society as a result of aging. She also devotes a fair amount of space to discussing
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the relationship between women and writing. For her, as for Xu Kun, there is no question
that women’s literature is different from men’s, as she writes:
Women’s literature exists. Women’s grasp of the world is somewhat different from men’s, women’s excellence is also not very similar to men’s; and women’s beauty is even more intrinsically different from men’s. Of course, this variety of difference might possibly be suggested to everyone by patriarchal culture. And the gap between individual difference and gender difference is even greater, even more deserving of being turned into literature.7
Like Xu Kun, Lin Bai also recognizes the pressures that patriarchal culture place on
women, and women writers in particular, to conform to a certain standard. When it
comes to women’s writing, Lin says that these expectations have caused (male) critics to
question the validity of her writing, or to criticize her work for not conforming to certain
standards. But as she says, “In my opinion, novels have no boundaries. Writing that
takes a long form is called a novel; it is the sum total of one person’s feelings, opinions,
recollections, cries, curses, despair, and smiles for the world. It ought to have one billion
forms, and not just one hundred forms.”8 For her, there is no one right way to write a
novel, and each person’s work must come from within themselves, must be a space where
they can represent their own self in the manner that they find most appropriate. This
stands in direct opposition to the patriarchal canon of literature, which conflates the
individual’s story with that of the nation, as in the case of individualized writing
(gerenhua xiezuo) or the autobiographical form, as discussed in Chapter I.
However, like Xu Kun, Lin also has reservations about describing herself as a
feminist. While she expresses the highest respect for feminists and the goals that they are
working for, she says that she is not strong or forceful enough of a person to completely
take up that cause or to call herself a feminist. She says:
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I revere feminism, and feminists like Elfriede Jelinek.9 But I think a formidable person of talent can become a feminist, a warrior, a hero; but I am rather soft and tenderhearted by nature and have an inherent fear of those fierce roles. Even if other people, whose inner selves are valiant, choose the same path as Jelinek, I am willing to be a small and weak person.10
Just as literature is the place where Lin finds relief from the outside world, a place which
she feels is suited to sensitive, timid, unusual, or otherwise frail people who are unable to
or uncomfortable with the pressures and the demands of the public space of the “real”
world, feminism is also too fierce a battleground for Lin. Rather, she prefers to write
about different kinds of women, women who find themselves at odds with social
expectations. As Lin describes:
A woman, if she is thirty years old and still unmarried, if she is a little narcissistic, has a little bit of an inferiority complex, a little bit of a tendency to blame and censure herself, and also regards herself as a little bit aloof from worldly matters, is a little bit resigned to her fate, and also a little bit not resigned to it, if she scorns common custom a little and also fears common custom a little, then she is not too distant from literature.11
Much like her own fascination with ghosts and fox spirits, as well as her preference for
poetic language, Lin’s interest in describing unusual women springs from her own
feelings of strangeness, anxiety, and timidity. Time and again in her writing she returns
to herself as the basis for her literature, emphasizing that it is a place of personal
expression, of self-creation. Moreover, much like her reluctance to label herself a
feminist or to tie her writing to larger social causes and thus give it an publicly-oriented
intent, she insists on writing women’s bodies which are only partially visible to the
reading public. These bodies exist only in the si-private space she creates in her fiction,
and like that space, are easily destroyed if that space is disturbed too much, as when
critics read these female bodies as Lin’s own in the autobiographical sense, or when they
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attempt to make the women that Lin writes about representative of women as a social
group. As Lin writes:
The kind of woman that first appeared in my fiction has now disappeared. They were once strange, mysterious, and hysterical; they blamed and censured themselves. They were also erotic, also graceful; but now they are lost. Their whispered talk on overcast rainy days, their stories of the window curtains’ mingled contrast of light and shadow, the sight of their screams, groans, shouts, and depressions remain until the very end. And also their long hair that has been cut off—they live in my paper; up until now it has been more than ten years, hasn’t it? But as soon as one says disappear they just disappear, just like steam drying as soon as the sun comes out.12
For her, as soon as these larger forces are invoked, or as de Man might say, as soon as we
mistakenly assign a prosopopetic value to Lin’s stories and the women that she narrates
within them, the si-private space that she is attempting to create is opened up and thus
stripped of its power as a space of self-creation. Therefore, like Xu Kun, while we can
say that Lin’s project of self-creation as one of resistance has a lot in common with the
feminist project it is not feminist per se.
Additionally, Lin Bai also addresses the idea that one person’s literature, or
indeed that the works of a few women writers, should speak for, or speak to, all women.
While she does not state so directly, it is clear from her essay that she takes issue with
criticism of her work as not being representative of women from the lower strata of
society and only pertaining to educated women, or former educated youth. She writes:
One must pay attention to the lowest layers, but I hope I hope that I am not standing outside peeping in but rather that I have placed myself amongst them, which is to say, that it proceeds from my own life, and diffuses the flavor of my life. It is explaining myself but not speaking on behalf of myself. Do I have the ability to speak for myself? Do I have the right to speak for myself? It seems as if I don’t. The important thing is, I feel, that explaining myself has even more consciousness than speaking on behalf of myself.13
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Like Xu Kun and the other female avant-garde writers, Lin Bai resists the idea that her
literature must be representative of some larger idea; for her, literature is a space for self-
creation, a si-private space where she is free to reflect on herself and try to get to the truth
of herself, apart from the demands that society has placed on her. It is, as she says, a
place for “explaining” herself, rather than “speaking on behalf of” herself. As de Man
has noted about the way prosopopeia functions in the autobiographical form, to speak on
behalf of someone is take away their voice, or to make them representative of larger
social phenomena, the forces of history, or the hopes of the nation at the cost of the
individual’s identity. As such, it is clear, that no matter whether she is writing fiction or
poetry, that for Lin writing is a place for personal expression, a place where she can
collect her thoughts and express her feelings; a medium where she is free to create a
personal, private space away from the demands of the world. It is a place of resistance
and freedom. She remarks on this when she writes:
For many years now I have completely isolated myself from the world; my inner self, gloomy and cold, permeated with anxiety and unsettled, intensely untrusting of others. This is how I shut the passageway between the world and myself. For many years now I have only passionately loved my life on paper, and have turned a blind eye to many things. For me, writing is everything and the world is nonexistent.14
Given this distinction, it is clear that the self (or selves) that Lin Bai narrates in her fiction
are different from the self that she presents in Notes from My Life; in the latter, Lin
speaks on behalf of her work, gives a voice to those voiceless works of fiction to defend
them against what she sees as critics’ misreading, whereas the former is a space she has
created just for herself, a place of si-privacy where she is free to express herself, a space
that can only be partially entered by the reading public.
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One Person’s War
In contrast to Xu Kun’s The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring, One Person’s War is a
non-linear collection of memories and observations. In it, Lin Bai loosely narrates the
life story of Lin Duomi. However, much like Xu Kun, Lin Bai writes a lot of herself into
Duomi. The novel itself switches back and forth from a first person narrator to a third
person narrator; in fact it is not until well into the first chapter that the reader learns that
“I” and Duomi are one and the same.15 Duomi was born in B-zhen, and like Lin Bai, her
father passed away when Duomi was three. Duomi’s mother is a doctor and often away
from home, and Duomi spends the majority of her childhood alone. Also, as a result of
this time spent apart, Duomi’s relationship with her mother is always strained at best, and
she is never entirely comfortable spending time with her mother. When Duomi is eight
her mother remarries, and Duomi never develops a relationship with her stepfather either.
In addition to all of the time that Duomi spends alone as a child, she also realizes early on
that she is very different from other children, particularly when it comes to her early
sexual explorations. Her mother is an obstetrician and gynecologist, and Duomi very
early on becomes fascinated with the female body, both her own and those of other
women. This feeling continues into Duomi’s adulthood, which causes her a lot of
anxiety. When Duomi is nineteen her first poems are accepted for publication, and
Duomi leaves B-zhen for N-cheng for the first time. She is offered a job with a film
production unit, however ultimately she chooses to take the college entrance exam
instead. She tests very well, and leaves G-sheng to go to university at W-da. After
university, Duomi moves back to N-cheng to work at the film production unit. When she
is twenty-four, Duomi both loses her virginity as well as meets the first love of her life;
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these two experiences will be discussed further below. Finally, by the time Duomi is
thirty years old, she has moved to Beijing, and met her second love, the greatest and last
love of her life. This affair does not end well, and at some point after Duomi marries an
older man with whom she has a comfortable, if loveless, relationship. The novel ends in
the same place that it begins, with Duomi gazing at herself in the mirror, pleasuring
herself.16
Much like The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring, there is almost no mention of
history in One Person’s War. In fact, the only time that any historical events are
mentioned directly is when Duomi is reflecting on her status as an “educated youth,” and
how the situation they face has improved over the years. Lin writes:
The cadre leading our educated youth production brigade was surnamed Li; the educated youth and peasants alike called him Comrade Li. Originally he was an ordinary cadre of a cement plant, and didn’t know how he had been sent to serve as a leader. Starting from 1975, because someone named Li Qinglin had written a letter to Chairman Mao, there had been improvements in the educated youth’s situation; when they were sent to the countryside the government allocated quilts and mosquito nets for them, and gave everyone in the production brigade a family resettlement allowance and a farm tool allowance. The first year everyone received 10 yuan each month, and food and oil were still supplied by the government, etc.17
In this case, much like those of the other female avant-garde writers, History is only
important in as much as it affects the selves that they are creating in their fiction. This is
an important distinction between the female avant-garde writers’ privacy writing, and the
individualized writing of the male avant-garde writers.18
Like Mao Zhen in Xu Kun’s The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring, Duomi is also a
writer. Duomi also initially longs to make a name for herself with her writing, and this
pushes her to first publish her poetry and then later on her short stories. She even comes
to the conclusion that she needs to write a novel for herself, which the reader then
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understands to be the novel that they are in the process of reading. Lin’s use of the
metafictional “self-begetting novel” form further helps to obscure the boundaries between
Lin the author and Duomi the character, which also helps her to create a space of si-
privacy within the novel, unlike the self that she represents in her Notes from My Life,
where little if any attempt is made to obfuscate the way Lin represents herself.19
Moreover, like Lin in Notes from My Life, Duomi spends a great deal of time
thinking about the role that writing plays in her life. In this sense, much like Xu
Kun/Mao Zhen, Lin Bai and Duomi share very similar feelings about what purpose
writing serves in their lives. Both Lin Bai and Duomi discuss how certain events from
their real lives become the material out of which they build their fiction, and how writing
is the only way to ease their anxieties, and both Lin Bai and Duomi have a special place
in their hearts for poetry more than fiction. However, for Duomi, the act of writing is a
more bodily act than it is when Lin Bai discusses it. In order for Duomi to enter a state
suitable for writing, she must first have bodily sensations from which to draw, as she
explains:
I hid in the room, the curtains which were always drawn made the light in the room pleasantly dim.…The dormitory area was silent; I took off my clothes and walked paced back and forth half-naked….This is my usual trick when I planned to enter a writing state. My body is very sensitive, and even a very thin layer of clothing can make me feel heavy and restricted. My body must be exposed to the open air—every pore is an eye, an ear; I expose them to the open air and listen attentively to that subtle voice which comes up from the depths of my memory, or which has been blocked by layer after layer of the passing years. At the same time there cannot be any breeze; only this way can I enter into the most beautiful state.20
In fact, the need for bodily experiences drives much of Duomi’s later actions, particularly
in her twenties. That Lin Bai ties Duomi’s writing so closely to her own physical
experiences emphasizes the connection between Duomi’s body as a unique individual
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rather than a representation for all women, as well as helps Lin to build a space of si-
privacy in the novel—while the reader may have had experiences which allows him/her
to empathize with Duomi, because her experiences are grounded in her body they
ultimately are her own and thus never fully opened to public consumption.
One of the reasons that it is so difficult to separate the private self that Lin Bai
narrates in One Person’s War from the public self that she presents in Notes from My Life
is there is a significant amount of overlap between the two in terms of content. In Notes
from My Life, Lin Bai speaks often about growing up in Beiliu, which in One Person’s
War becomes B-zhen (B镇). In fact, the essay “Reverie of Death” from Notes from My
Life is an almost verbatim reprinting of a passage from One Person’s War about Beiliu’s
ghosts and its mention in Cihai.21 In addition, other important places from her life appear
in both Notes from My Life and One Person’s War: Nanning, which becomes N-cheng
(N城), Guangxi Province or G-sheng (G省), and Wuhan University or W-da (W大).
Beyond the inclusion of important places from her life as the same important
places for Duomi, certain moments from Lin Bai’s life are recreated in Duomi’s life as
well. For example, in, “Climbing Emei shan Alone” in Notes from My Life, Lin Bai
describes traveling to Emei shan in Sichuan, and meeting a young man there named Li
Huarong. He is a local student, and offers to help show her around Emei shan, as she is
traveling on her own. Initially she is a bit suspicious of him, but in the end discovers that
he is being honest with her. He even goes to his home to borrow clothing from his sister
to give to Lin Bai, as she has not packed appropriately for the weather. They part ways
when Lin begins to ascend the mountain. When she returns home she tries to find him to
return the clothing, and is unsuccessful; the selection ends with her wondering about him
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and what has happened to him. The same episode appears, with only minor changes, in
One Person’s War, after Duomi goes to Yunnan and encounters the woman who would
later become her Zhu Liang.22 Similarly, in “The Pause in My Education,” her memories
of being moved to her uncle’s house after her mother remarried, which makes up the first
portion of that selection, are repeated in their entirety in One Person’s War, as is her
experience when she goes to Nanning at the age of nineteen to edit her poems prior to her
first publication in “Reaching Nanning.”23 While it is not entirely clear from these
episodes themselves why Lin would choose to narrate them so faithfully in both her self-
referential fiction as well as her Notes from My Life, it is clear that this strategy is one
which both helps Lin to create a space for self-reflection and self-creation in her fiction,
and preserve that space as one of mediated access. That is to say, when Lin blurs the
lines between what is fiction and what is the “truth” of her own lived experiences by
including similar moments in both her self-referential fiction and her publicly-oriented
Notes from My Life, which she has already described as being as simple as someone
“changing their clothes,”24 she controls the amount of access that the reader has to her
self; readers who are more familiar with the corpus of Lin’s work will likely have a
greater degree of access to the si-private space that Lin creates, however, in the end only
Lin herself knows what is “real” and what is “fake.” As such, we can see how Lin
weaves together various forms of self-narration to create her space of si-privacy, a space
that goes beyond just One Person’s War and encompasses all of her fiction.
Far more so than in Xu Kun’s or Hai Nan’s writing, Lin Bai weaves her space of
si-privacy together out of her corpus of writing as a whole, interconnecting stories
between them which span the course of her history and development as a writer. There
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are several important sections from One Person’s War which appear not only in her
Notes from My Life but also in her other fiction as well, a technique which encourages
readers to familiarize themselves with all of Lin’s writing in order to have greater access
to the self that she creates in that fiction, but at the same time limits the extent to which
the reader is able to know, or consume, that self. These moments appear in some of her
most well known stories, and often in more than one place. For example, the following
passage from One Person’s War appears in Notes from My Life as well. In One Person’s
War, Duomi has been describing dreams that she often had as a child—about the deaths
of family members, especially her mother, and eventually of herself as well. She also
dreams that she is getting married:
In addition to dreaming about death, my most terrifying dreams and the ones I dreamt most often were about marriage. I don’t know how I could dream about marriage at that young of an age. In my way of thinking marriage is also a dreadful affair. I think I am never going to marry, I am another kind of person; but often in my dreams I am being controlled by a powerful force, forced to marry against my will. My dreams about marriage are always at the wedding ceremony, like the adult wedding ceremonies that I had seen many times, I don’t know why. For absolutely no reason whatsoever I am then put in front of a table and some other people tell me that this is my wedding. If the bridegroom standing at my side is not the most deficient boy in the class then he is the most ugly boy in B town. I immediately then startle awake from out of my dreams, my whole body drenched in cold sweat. When I am half-awake and half-asleep real and false are indistinguishable, I desperately think: it’s all over.25
These dreams are some of the reader’s first clues about Duomi’s character, about her
feelings and fears. Furthermore, as the passage goes on, she also describes a dream she
had long forgotten about rainbows that she would have when she was sick as a child, and
how later in life she would remember that dream. She writes:
Twenty or more years later, the year I was thirty, my boyfriend at the time gave me a small black clock, roughly the same size as the palm of a hand, square-shaped. There was one night when I discovered that the clock face radiated rainbow rays of light; these rainbow rays of light were reflected on the shiny
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tabletop and became small slices of lifeless rainbow light. The clock face and the tabletop were reflecting each other’s rainbows, which composed an extremely peculiar pattern. This made me remember suddenly that dream I had when I was small. Until now I an unclear what this mysterious relationship predicts. It wasn’t until after my relationship with that person ended that I suddenly discovered, the black clock is a dreadful token, its slim white clock hands and black base, like a black cat’s face with white whiskers, sinister as the passing years.26
She repeats her description of the clock word for word in one of her most well known
short stories, “True-Hearted Lovers Cannot Separate,” for which she won critical acclaim
in 1989.
In “True-Hearted Lovers Cannot Separate,” Lin tells several different stories, that
of the “woman in white,” of “I,” and of Du Lu. The “I” narrator’s story overlaps
significantly with Duomi’s story in One Person’s War: they are both women in their
thirties who fall in love with a man who always remains somewhat distant. During the
course of their respective affairs, both Duomi and the “I” narrator in “True-Hearted
Lovers Cannot Separate” become pregnant, and are forced to choose between the child
and the man that they love. In both cases, the man, called “N” in Duomi’s case and
“Tiancheng” (Libra, his astrological sign) in the “I” narrator’s case, tells her that if they
are determined to keep the child, that he will marry her, but then he will leave and never
come back. After Duomi and the “I” narrator choose to have an abortion, in both cases
he still ends up leaving. For both women, this love affair is very powerful and very
destructive; Duomi’s relationship with N will be discussed further below.
In addition to the parallels between this love story in One Person’s War and
“True-Hearted Lovers Cannot Separate,” there is another connection between the two
stories—that of the “woman in white” and Duomi’s friend Meiju. In “True-Hearted
Lovers Cannot Separate,” the “I” narrator’s story mixes with that of the “woman in
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white,” at times becoming indistinguishable. The “woman in white” is a reclusive
beauty, whose house on Sand Street is always closed tightly to the outside world.27 She
is a former film star, who has withdrawn from the world as the result of her own painful
love affair gone wrong; at times it is unclear whether it is the “I” narrator who has
become pregnant, or if this was a moment from the “woman in white’s” past, or both. In
One Person’s War, on the other hand, Meiju is the woman that Duomi lives with when
she first moves to Beijing. Lin Bai also describes Meiju in a similar fashion to the
“woman in white,” saying:
Meiju was the woman Duomi called teacher. Meiju’s age was somewhere between forty and fifty; her features were beautiful and ice-cold. Her whole life she had never married, and she had maintained her figure and her breasts were still firm. This made Duomi feel completely amazed. Meiju lived alone in a two-room house. All of her windows had rough homespun cloth curtains with a dark blue background and white flowers. No matter whether it was daytime or late at night, the curtains were always drawn, and inside it was always shady and cool and dim. There were a lot of mirrors. As soon as one entered the door there was a mirror which covered half of the facing wall, like the makeup room backstage in a theater. A full-length mirror that went all the way to the ground.28
Both women are obsessed with mirrors, and both women have withdrawn from the
outside world, existing solely within a private world of their own making. This is
particularly important for Duomi, as she too withdraws from the world after her own
painful and failed love affair—as Lin points out, Duomi calls Meiju her “teacher.” And
as a result of the muddled overlapping between her own past that she narrates in Notes
from My Life along with Duomi’s story in One Person’s War and both the “I” narrator
and the “woman in white” in “True-Hearted Lovers Cannot Separate,” we can see yet
again how Lin Bai is creating a space of si-privacy for herself in her fiction, a space
which both becomes easier to define as the reader becomes more familiar with Lin’s
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writing, while at the same time remaining only hazy at best, a place that the reading
public can only partially enter.
A whole section of another of Lin’s stories, “The Rose Corridor,” (Meigui
guodao) appears in its entirety in One Person’s War. And just as in the case of “True-
Hearted Lovers Cannot Separate,” there are strong parallels between the “I narrator” in
“The Rose Corridor,” the “I” narrator in “True-Hearted Lovers Cannot Separate,” and
Duomi in One Person’s War. In “The Rose Corridor,” the “I” narrator describes her love
for a man who is no longer with her, although where he has gone is unclear; it is also
unclear whether or not he is still living. The building where he used to live has been torn
down and another is being built in it place, and as the “I” narrator gazes at the
construction site from her own window she remembers the man she had once loved.
Given the parallels between “True-Hearted Lovers Cannot Separate” and One Person’s
War that already exist and the details of the “I” narrator’s love story in “The Rose
Corridor” it is easy to conclude that that man who is no longer present in “The Rose
Corridor” is N from One Person’s War and Tiancheng from “True-Hearted Lovers
Cannot Separate.” At one point the “I” narrator remembers spying on the man, left
nameless in this story interestingly, to see if he is with another woman. What she sees,
and what Duomi sees in One Person’s War, is completely the same in both cases, as Lin
Bai describes:
Once I saw that bicycle of his from the window with a red woman’s-style bicycle lined up together. A woman’s-style bicycle was a woman, that is to say, there was a woman with him, what was he doing with her? Drinking coffee or in bed? I discovered myself not at all calm and indifferent. Almost every minute I wanted to go look out the window, determined to get a glance of this woman’s appearance, to see if she was pretty or not, fashionable or not, graceful and easy, tall, short, fat, thin: to see this all clearly. What kind of low-quality woman was this? Then I saw that his bicycle was not there. That red bicycle was still there
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though. That red bicycle was still there and his bicycle was already gone. The red bicycle was there alone; there were no other bicycles. Only a small red bicycle on the empty, swept-clean cement ground, the other bicycles had all gone to work. Only it didn’t need to go to work; he also didn’t need to go to work. Maybe he left to buy her things to eat. Sure enough his bicycle did return again, placing his bicycle next to hers. You think this must be real. He certainly did take that roasting pot with the pale flowers on it to go buy her some rice noodles; she is eating them, she must be extremely hungry. In the afternoon I saw his bicycle had left and the red bicycle was still there; I relaxed a sigh and lay down on my bed, feeling weak from head to foot, and thought, the red bicycle apparently did not have any relationship with him. But at the same time I also thought that maybe he let her stay alone in his room. I needed to see with my own eyes who was riding this bicycle. I was glued to the window, at last near evening I saw a short fat man come riding this bicycle. When he tried to get on it he had a difficult time moving his leg to straddle it. This is all extremely boring. I cannot put up with myself. I always want to go to the corridor, to look at his window and see if his bicycle is there or not. I cannot tell him, cannot let him know; I also cannot talk to my girlfriends. I want to come off as casual and elegant.29
While this event is not significant in and of itself except for its repetition, it is yet another
example of how Lin Bai muddies the assumed transparency of a female author’s
autobiographical writings.
There are also a number of other repeated passages that are also significant for
Lin Bai and Duomi. For example, for both women, the passing of their fathers when they
were three years old was a very traumatic event, and one that both women often return to
in their respective stories. One particular passage appears in both Notes from My Life and
her short story “The Eye on the Wall.” (Qiang shang de yanjing). Once again, in “The
Eye on the Wall” there is an “I” narrator, who tells the story of her younger brother
Doudou. In it worth pointing out that the narrator in “The Eye on the Wall” is one of
Lin’s most obscure; except for a single brief mention in passing, there are absolutely no
clues as to the narrator’s gender.30 For both the “I” narrator in “The Eye on the Wall”
and Duomi in One Person’s War, after their respective mothers remarry, all visual
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reminders of their respective biological fathers are removed. As Lin writes in “The Eye
on the Wall:”
Owing to the arrival of our second father, our photographs of our biological father were gathered together and stored away. They had originally been placed in a purplish-red cloth photograph album together with many pictures of our young mother. The album was placed in a drawer; on countless days while mother went out to work, I often turned it over…. On the top there were a few picture slots that didn’t have any pictures; on that thick black paper they floated alone, sometimes several whole consecutive pages would not have a single picture. The pictures of our mother when she was young were left in the photo album; there was a kind of startling feeling of bleakness and desolation. That completely full photo album, laden with our parents’ youthful images was not there. When it appeared the next time it was just like a blind person and a husky voice.31
While Duomi never speaks specifically about this photo album, her memories of the loss
of her father are equally traumatic and painful. For her, as for Lin Bai in Notes from My
Life and the “I” narrator in “The Eye on the Wall,” it is this loss which takes away all of
her feelings of safety, and indirectly leads to their childhoods spent alone and their distant
relationships with their mothers. Even the time that Duomi and Lin Bai must each miss
school, an episode which is repeated almost verbatim in both One Person’s War and
Notes from My Life, can be tied back to their father’s death.32 And just as in the case of
“True-Hearted Lovers Cannot Separate,” yet again Lin Bai builds her space of si-privacy
out of and between her various works, both inviting the reader to discover more about Lin
Bai herself and yet always mediating the amount of that self that the reader is actually
able to make out clearly.
Also, much like Xu Kun ascribes works she has written to Mao Zhen in The
Twenty-Two Nights of Spring, so too does Lin Bai have Duomi author works of fiction
which have the same name as Lin’s own. For example, at one point Duomi goes
traveling in Malipo County, Yunnan. While there, she meets a beautiful woman who
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seems to know her, although the two have never met. This woman instantly has a very
powerful effect on Duomi, as Lin describes:
This was how I saw her—a woman wearing an old-style qipao standing in a large courtyard, a thin layer of mist suspended in front of my face, reflecting the sallow light. This made her silhouette seem a bit unclear, as though it had been cut off by some kind of heavy curtain that was difficult to describe. This woman is the one who would appear about ten years later in the short story I wrote called “The Seat on the Verandah.” Before she had reached the tip of my pen I met her.33
However, unlike Xu Kun’s references to her own writing in The Twenty-Two Nights of
Spring, where the titles of Mao Zhen’s works are close approximations of Xu Kun’s
actual works, in One Person’s War Duomi’s stories share the same titles as Lin’s own
stories, adding yet another layer which obscures Lin Bai’s “real” life from the self that
she narrates in her fiction. As Lin discusses in her Notes from My Life, it was actually
seeing an old photograph of one of friend and fellow author Fang Fang’s family members
dressed in a qipao that inspired Lin to write “The Seat on the Verandah.”34 On the other
hand, on One Person’s War, Duomi is traveling by herself through a remote part of
Yunnan when she finds the old mansion that Zhu Liang used to live in, and her encounter
with Zhu Liang can be as easily understood as an encounter with a real woman as it can
with a ghost, or even a dream that Duomi has had, as Lin writes:
Ten years later, sure enough as Zhu Liang had predicted I came again to this place, I found that woman’s living quarters. An old gatekeeper told me that fifty years earlier Zhu Liang has been the concubine of the master of the house, Zhang Mengda. She had gone to a foreign school, and had been the beauty of her generation, but she had died fifty years ago. I knew that Zhu Liang was certainly waiting for me in that mysterious room covered with mirrors, but in her haste she had forgotten to tell me how to return. I could only stay outside that yellow light, and fix my gaze on the image imprisoned in the deep recesses of that time.35
For Duomi, the boundaries between reality and dreaming as well as those between real
people and spirits are extremely fluid, and she often remarks that the only way that she
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can tell the difference between reality and fantasy is by keeping a diary. Lin Bai also
writes about how she has kept diaries since she was young, about how the act of writing
helps her to soothe her anxieties, as well as record her past experiences. For both women
the act of writing is central to their lives, just as it plays a similar role in the other works
by the female avant-garde writers and the selves that they narrate in their fiction as well.
Moreover, it is not just in her copious use of self-referential details, or the web of
interconnections that she weaves between her various stories that we can see how Lin Bai
creates her space of si-privacy in her fiction, but also in her use of alternative expressions
for female sexuality and desire. Compared with Xu Kun’s description of the
development of Mao Zhen’s desire in The Twenty-Two Nights of Spring Lin Bai’s are
much more graphic, and much less conventional. In Lin’s writing, the uplifting attributes
of passion (qing)—its sublime nature— are usually connected with female expression, be
it of desire, of power, or of resistance; heterosexual or patriarchal relationships are
usually portrayed at best as strange or somehow twisted, and at worst as destructive and
unhealthy. As previously mentioned, this sublime fascination with the female body
begins early on for Duomi, when she is only five or six. It is unclear (and also
unimportant) whether this fascination comes from secretly spying on her mother at work,
or from playing with the anatomical models that are lying around her house as a result of
her mother’s work, or simply as the result of early childhood sex play—all of which are
possibilities that Duomi suggests when trying to make sense of the fact that she not only
started to explore her body around the age of five or six, but also engaged in this kind of
experimentation with her friend Lili. For Duomi, the possibility that she is actually a
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homosexual is a one which she wrestles with over the years. For example, when Duomi
thinks back on the game that she used to play with Lili as a child, Lin writes:
Remembering this matter made me feel extremely panicked. I was completely afraid that I was a innate homosexual, that this is a chronic psychological problem. It was like a thick plot, in the future would I be forever cut off form normal people? I stubbornly resisted this idea.36
However it is also clear that Duomi’s anxiety is not actually that she might be a
homosexual, but rather that by being herself she might be cut off from mainstream
society, an anxiety which plagues her in various forms over her whole life. She often
remarks that she is not like other girls, and some of her colleagues even tell her that her
writing is like a man’s.37 Rather, for Duomi, despite her eventual sexual encounters with
men as an adult, women are far more attractive, intoxicating, and memorable than are
men.
Duomi’s fascination is not limited to physical desire either. Rather, she loves
everything about women from the way that they look, dress, and behave to the way they
smell and feel.38 Moreover, Duomi, like Meiju and the “woman in white,” also really
likes mirrors. While she does not find herself beautiful, she often speaks about staring
into the mirror, saying, “I like mirrors; I like to look at private places. In the subtropical
regions, those endlessly long summer days, I would be alone in the shower room taking
showers, looking at myself for a long time, and also gently caressing myself.”39 Again
and again, Duomi expresses a preference for those secret, hidden, or otherwise private
things in One Person’s War just as Lin Bai herself does in Notes from My Life. “Secret”
(秘密 mimi), “hidden” (隐秘 yinmi), and “concealed” (隐藏 yincang) appear frequently
in all of her writing, along with a number of other similar words. It is clear that for Lin
Bai, part of the sublime quality of the female form comes from its private, hidden
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aspects—what she is fascinated with in her own body and what she desires from other
women’s bodies is knowledge of these secret places. Moreover, that Lin Bai writes
Duomi as a character like many others in her fiction who desire to know these secrets for
themselves rather than for the purpose of exposing them returns again to Lin’s ultimate
purpose in writing, that is, to create a si-private space in her literature where she can
narrate a female form which has not been appropriated by the nation or society and given
another meaning or turned into an allegory for all women’s experiences; a space of
resistance.
Duomi’s sublime feelings extend to the other women in her life as well—these are
the only relationships which are fulfilling or meaningful for Duomi in any way. This is
an important distinction that Lin makes between these homosocial female friendships and
the more socially codified heterosexual or familial relationships, all of which remain
unfamiliar and uncomfortable for Duomi throughout her life, and which will be discussed
further below. She has two other significant female friendships, in addition to her
relationship with Lili when they were children. The first of these, with a dancer named
Yao Qiong, happens when Duomi is eight years old, and goes to see a performance of the
ballet The White Haired Girl. Yao Qiong dances the lead role in the ballet, and right
away Duomi is taken with her—the grace, strength, and beauty of her body. Duomi’s
mother arranges for Duomi to be able to watch the performances from backstage, and
Duomi becomes Yao Qiong’s assistant, often helping her change clothes. One night,
Duomi even spends the night at the theater with Yao Qiong because it has gotten too late
for her to go home. This relationship is significant for Duomi in that it is one of her first
close friendships with an older woman. Duomi’s relationship with her mother is strained
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and awkward, whereas she is relaxed and happy when she is with Yao Qiong. And while
Duomi’s relationship with Yao Qiong is tinged with desire, it is a double-layered desire,
as Lin herself explains: a desire for Yao Qiong, and a desire to grow up to be like Yao
Qiong.40
The second major female relationship that Duomi has is when she is twenty-four
years old, and living in N-cheng. She meets a younger woman named Nandan, who is
twenty-one, and who helps draw Duomi out of her completely reclusive state. As Duomi
describes her:
Nandan was the first unusual relationship that I had with a woman in my life. This is a very strange thing, that because of this girl who was a few years younger than I, I would find my feminine self. I had had lost this feeling in my childhood—I would never act coquettishly, nor would I behave coyly. I couldn’t make the myriad forms of flirtatious expressions. I lived like a genderless person, without any feeling for any men; and on the other hand, at the same time, I didn’t need the slightest bit of love.41
Nandan shows Duomi how to dress and wear makeup, and helps her to feel comfortable
being more social and more feminine. They originally meet as a result of a conference on
poetry, after which they become very close very quickly. However, the end of the
relationship comes when Nandan confesses to Duomi that she is a homosexual and tells
Duomi that she is in love with her. This is around the time that Nandan is taking her
exams to finish university; at this point Nandan has already written and mailed the letter,
but Duomi has not yet received it. Every night after Nandan’s tests are over she comes to
stay with Duomi. Originally, Duomi tells Nandan that she is unable to sleep with other
people; even when she was small Duomi could only fall asleep alone. Nandan says she
understands, and goes to great lengths that night to make sure that Duomi is unaware of
her presence so she will sleep well, which she does. The second night, Nandan returns to
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spend the night, and Duomi feels confident that she will be able to pass the night without
incident. However, that night Duomi has terrible nightmares. One the third day, Duomi
again has nightmares all night, after which Nandan’s letter arrives. Duomi destroys the
letter, afraid that one of her colleagues will discover it, and pulls away from Nandan.
While their relationship ultimately ends poorly, is it a very important turning
point for Duomi. First, it is the most significant relationship that Duomi has with another
person up to that point in her life, and Nandan is the first person that Duomi is able to
open up to. And despite her own reluctance to give in to her homosocial urges, Nandan
is the first person that Duomi feels real emotion for, above and beyond her sublime
passion for the female body. Secondly, as a result of her relationship with Nandan,
Duomi opens up to the possibility of experiencing the world herself, which then leads to
another one of the most significant events in Duomi’s life—when she loses her virginity,
also when Duomi is twenty-four. Moreover, Lili, Yao Qiong, Nandan, and Meiju are just
four of the women who pass through Duomi’s life who leave a lasting impression on her;
there is also a woman named Wang who is one of her roommates while she is in college,
and several other women that she meets in various places as she remembers moments
from her past and talks about their influence on her writing. For Duomi, it is in the
bodies, and secrets, of other women that she sees her desire reflected and her poetry
inspired—they are the mysterious, other-worldly beings who arouse her most sublime of
passions, and the people that she remembers most clearly throughout her life.
On the other hand, Duomi’s relationships with men are largely unsettling and
unfamiliar if not outright destructive. From her distant relationship with her stepfather to
her comfortable if loveless relationship with her own husband, the socially normative
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heterosexual roles offer none of the uplifting aspects of passion to Duomi that her
relationships with women do.42 This is true from her very first encounter with a man, in
her last year in college. She has gone into the forest near the university to read, and while
she is there, she is attacked by a young man. First he chokes until she almost loses
consciousness, and then he drags her into a nearby air-raid shelter to rape her. However,
even in the middle of almost being raped, Duomi discovers that her attacker is a bit
unusual, as Lin Bai describes:
As soon as Duomi got used to the light in the air-raid shelter she realized with a shock that this rapist was a bright-eyed and beautiful young man. His skin was white and delicate, and he seemed to be blushing; especially conspicuous were his lips, which were red and mumbly like a little girl’s. There were no boys in Duomi’s class who had lips like this, and Duomi saw that above his lips was a layer of delicate blond hair. Completely inexperienced, he moved around on Duomi’s body. Disappointedly he said, you’re really thin. He did up his pants again, realized that Duomi was watching him, took a handkerchief out of his pocket and covered Duomi’s eyes, saying: you’re not allowed to watch. And then he anxiously went to the corner and started to play with himself.43
Not only is her attacker seemingly too inexperienced around women to know how to rape
Duomi, but he is also unable to pleasure himself in her presence. Moreover, there is
something almost feminine about his appearance as well, and when he is not able to
climax, Duomi starts a conversation with him. The whole episode ends with this young
man walking her down from the forest, buying her some small things to eat and drink,
and asking if he can be her boyfriend, although they only see each other one more time
before Duomi leaves W-da to work in N-cheng. Additionally, Duomi is not even able to
remember his name clearly after all this time; she thinks it might be Wang Guoqing or
Wang Jianguo, but she is not sure. Despite the violent nature of her introduction to
heterosexual passion, it seems to make very little impression on Duomi, except for the
young man’s girlish red lips, which she mentions several times.
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Rather, it is not until she is twenty-four, when she loses her virginity, that Duomi
discovers just how painful and strange heterosexual relationships are for her. While she
is traveling she meets a man who sweeps her off her feet. After Nandan, Duomi decides
that she wants to experience everything, and this man, who she calls Tiancun (a
pseudonym), offers her that possibility. When she is concerned that she will miss seeing
a famous landmark in the night as they pass, he offers to wake her up; once he does so
and they are alone, he kisses her so passionately that she feels her sexual desire awakened
for the first time. He tells her that he is twenty-seven, and they decide to go to a hot
spring together. Later on, Duomi learns that everything Tiancun had told her about
himself was a lie; he is not twenty-seven but thirty-seven, and he has a wife and children.
Like the former girlfriend who goes to visit Mao Zhen, Duomi learns all of this from
Tiancun’s wife, when she comes to face Duomi and “size her up.”
However, while Duomi is still unaware of this, the two disembark and go to the
hotel to check in before visiting the hot springs. Duomi does not realize that Tiancun has
obtained a fake marriage certificate for them, so that they can sleep in the same room
together. It is not until they get to the room and Duomi discovers that there is only one
bed that she realizes what his true intentions are. She makes him promise to leave and
get his own room, but in the end he is able to take what he wants from her, almost
without her realizing it:
A burst of severe pain remained inside Duomi’s body; as long as the man was moving this pain would increase as though there were a fire burning her in that certain part of her body, burning painfully. The pain was like a thick, coarse fabric, and covered over all other fine and delicate sensations. Even for the next few days, as the pain gradually receded, she did not get the slightest amount of pleasure.44
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Lin Bai’s description of Duomi’s sensations during her first sexual encounter are
remarkably similar to Xu Kun’s descriptions of Mao Zhen’s sexual encounter with
Pangda Gu’ai—a fiery burning which threatens to consume her. In Duomi’s case, this
burning sensation is so intense that it destroys all of those other delicate bodily sensations
that are so important to her—they are the source of her own desire and the means by
which she is able to write. As such, it is clear how destructive heterosexual desire is for
Duomi, especially as her night with Tiancun continues:
Filled with pain she fell asleep. In the middle of the night he woke her up because he wanted her again, and she said: I hurt so badly. But she had no strength, and no way to prevent him from entering her body again. The feeling of burning pain rose in her again, and she started to be aware that he felt absolutely no tenderness for her, this man on top of her had not the slightest amount of concern for her desires. He was a scoundrel, and a lecher, and in the end, with her eyes wide open she had let him trample on her “wedding night.”45
It is not until she has actually experienced heterosexual desire that Duomi truly learns
how destructive it is for her, how completely lacking in any of the beautiful or uplifting
aspects that her feelings for women have. And much like her depictions of heterosexual
desire in her other fiction as well, it is in Lin Bai’s portrayal of socially normative desire
as unfamiliar and damaging that she is able to use the space of si-privacy that she creates
in her fiction as one a place of resistance.
Moreover, it is not just in her depictions of heterosexual physical desire that Lin is
able to show how damaging normative roles are for women, but also in her portrayal of
the psychology of male-female relationships. For example, when Duomi is thirty years
old, she meets a man she identifies only as N. It is interesting that the three most
important men in Duomi’s sexual past are all identified either by pseudonyms, as in the
case of Tiancheng and N, or are left more or less nameless, as in the case of Wang
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Guoqing/Jianguo. Additionally, the male character who resembles N in “True-Hearted
Lovers Cannot Separate” is also referred to by a pseudonym, Tiancheng, and the same
character in “The Rose Corridor” is left completely nameless. While it would take a
much more detailed investigation of the whole corpus of Lin’s work to answer
definitively, it is reasonable to assume that these men are left nameless either because it
further destabilizes the socially-constructed roles that they represent, or because in doing
so, they become symbolic of all men, thus allowing Lin to turn the more common
appropriation of the female body on its end and instead use her representations of the
male body as an indictment of the patriarchal system which has created the very socially-
constructed roles she resists in her fiction.
Returning to One Person’s War, however, Duomi’s relationship with N is quite
different from her relationship with Tiancun. He works at the film production unit as
well, as a director, and she falls for him completely. They begin a passionate affair,
albeit somewhat one-sided—Duomi’s feelings for N are far more intense than his, and
she is willing to do anything for him:
My love for him was inexhaustible. I longed for him to come every day, and after he arrived I longed for him to stay, hoping that he wanted me. Actually, when I made love with him I had never been aroused; sometimes it was even a little bit physically unbearable. But I thought, he’s a man, and men certainly will want to, so I ought to do my part. It only took a few days of him not coming for me to feel that I couldn’t go on living, to think about suicide.46
Duomi’s feelings for N are so intense that she is willing to put up with her physical
discomfort with heterosexual sex and her lack of desire in order to make him happy; she
even feels that she is losing herself in the relationship and cannot exist without him. As
such, just like sex with Tiancheng destroys all of the delicate feelings that Duomi values
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so highly, Lin Bai shows the destructive nature of heterosexual love for Duomi, which
threaten to swallow up her very life.
The destructive aspect of heterosexual relationships extends not only to Duomi
herself, but also to the product of their sexual union: Duomi’s pregnancy. Like the “I”
narrator in “True-Hearted Lovers Cannot Separate,” in the course of her relationship with
N Duomi realizes that she is pregnant. Duomi decides she wants to keep the baby, even
if it means raising the child on her own. However, when she tells N about the child and
her plans to keep it, she is unprepared for his reaction. Secretly she had hoped that he
would be excited about the child, but rather he tells her that he will have a marriage
certificate prepared for them, and then leave directly and never come back. When Duomi
asks if he will ever contact her, he responds by saying no, and even refuses her request to
leave a photo of himself behind so that the child might know what his/her father looks
like. Faced with the choice between the love of her life and her unborn child, Duomi
chooses to have an abortion, mistakenly thinking that this will right everything between
N and herself. In the end, however, he not only makes no effort to see how she is doing
after the procedure, but also leaves her entirely. Shortly thereafter, Duomi learns that N
has in fact been seeing another (younger) woman, and has asked her to marry him. After
this, Duomi’s relationship with N ends, and shortly thereafter she moves to Beijing and
manages to forget him.
While Duomi mourns the loss of her child, it is important to note that she does not
blame herself for loss of her child; rather, she blames N, at one point even remarking that
he has killed their child. This is not the first time that the subject of abortion comes up in
One Person’s War, in fact, it is possible (if unclear) that Duomi also was pregnant with
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Tiancheng’s child and had another, earlier abortion as well.47 Whether or not Duomi has
had an earlier abortion, what is most important to note about her experience with N is that
she does not assign fault to herself for the death of her child; rather, she blames N, at one
point even telling him that he has murdered their child. As such, we can see yet again
that there are no redeeming qualities to Duomi’s love for N; her relationship threatens her
physically, emotionally, and even reproductively. And in doing so, it is another example
of how Lin Bai portrays heterosexual relationships as dangerous to Duomi’s selfhood,
completely lacking in any of the uplifting, sublime qualities that her relationships with
other women have. From her distant relationship with her mother and stepfather, to the
men who have used and abused her physically and emotionally, Lin Bai’s portrayal of
heteronormative relationships in a negative light, when places alongside her very positive
descriptions of alternative forms of female sexuality is yet another of the techniques that
she uses to resist the socially-constructed, and publicly-appropriated, image of the female
body and create for herself a si-private place of resistance in her fiction.
Conclusion
In addition to the criticism often aimed at Lin’s work, as Wang Lingzhen has
noted at the very beginning of this chapter—that it is little more than glorified
pornography—Lin Bai’s fiction is also often read by feminist critics as antidote to male
writing and patriarchal culture. These critics also focus on the ways in which Lin uses
gender and sexuality in her fiction, as Wang points out:
In autobiographical works by Chen Ran and Lin Bai, for example, gendered perspectives predominate, sex is a major topic, and privacy is the book’s very trademark. Personal voices triumph as the most conscious and valuable presence, while public morality regarding love, marriage, and sex is mocked, transgressed,
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and rendered irrelevant….Lin Bai…adheres to personalized writing, stating that public-oriented and collectively framed memory destroys personal memories and thus makes personal selves disappear.48
Similar to the way contemporary academics and critics alike shy away from using terms
like “private writing” or “privacy literature” when talking about the fiction of the avant-
garde women writers in favor of the more neutral term “individualized writing,” Lin
herself also dislikes using terms such as these because of the negative connotations
associated with the term si. As she has commented in her own writing and in various
interviews, and as Wang notes above, what she is most interested in is the excavation of
the individual from under the weight of the collective, and the use of individualized,
personal memories to resist the forces of history and (male-) culture. As Kay Schaffer
and Song Xianlin discuss in their article on the four different kinds of Chinese women’s
writing which depict a uniquely Chinese feminist point-of-view; the female avant-garde
writers make up one of these groups. As Schaffer and Song note:
Poststructural writers like Lin Bai and Chen Ran produce experimental prose that challenges both Chinese traditions and contemporary patriarchal discourses. Far from being confined to the personal, this writing discursively connects the personal to social, political, historical, and economic dimensions of Chinese society…It introduces a female aesthetic that refuses the boundaries of male-centered discourses and practices.49
While I agree that functionally, Lin Bai’s fiction does address the “social, political,
historical, and economic dimensions” that Schaffer and Song refer to, I argue that this is a
by-product of the Lin’s ultimate project of self-writing. And while it is impossible to
separate the self that Lin writes about from her femaleness, it is important to remember
that her project is not specifically feminist per se, as she herself talks about in Notes from
My Life. For to overread the femaleness that Lin describes in her fiction is to essentialize
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the self that she writes about, and force the space that she creates for herself in her fiction
into the realm of the public. As Tze-lan Sang says:
The unfolding of half a lifetime through an extended, undulating narrative, in an imagistic diction rich with light, sound, odors, taste, and touch, is more humane and comes closer to Lin’s being than taxonomic classifications. Her pursuit as an artist is not to collapse experiential plenitude into one work, much less into identity politics.50
That is to say, when read as feminist in intent and attached to larger social movements
such as the identity politics that Sang mentions, or the social and political forces that
Schaffer and Song discuss, the individuals that Lin writes about in her fiction become, to
however small an extent, representative of the situation faced by all women, just as she as
a writer becomes representative of a whole group of female writers. And in doing so,
these critics collapse the space that Lin creates for herself in her fiction. As such, and in
order to preserve this space, it is necessary to add a discussion of how Lin creates this si-
private space in her fiction—through the use of self-referential details and alternative
forms of female sexuality connected with the sublime aspects of qing. Only once we
understand how Lin creates this space for herself in her fiction is it possible to investigate
how this space functions to question heteronormative culture and its effect on an
individual woman’s selfhood, and how it reaches the same end goal as other pointedly
feminist writing, while not being motivated by feminism in and of itself.
Notes 1 Wang, 176. Also note that there are several translations commonly used for the title of Lin Bai’s Yigeren de zhanzheng (一个人的战争): Self at War, as Wang Lingzhen mentions; there are also A War With Oneself, and One Person’s War, which I use in this
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chapter. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine and remain as close to Lin Bai’s original wording as possible. 2 Lin Bai, “Some Words for Fang Fang,” (语言口中的方方 Yuyan kou zhong de Fang Fang) in The Gold of Previous Incarnations: Notes from My Life (前世的黄金：我的人生笔记 Qianshi de huangjin: Wode rensheng biji), 152.
3 Lin Bai, “Secret Flowers,” (秘密之花 Mimi zhi hua) in The Gold of Previous Incarnations: Notes from My Life, 74. 4 Lin Bai, “Secret Flowers,” 74-75. 5 Lin Bai, “Prose and Me,” (我与散文 Wo yu sanwen) in The Gold of Previous Incarnations: Notes from My Life, 115. 6 Lin Bai, “The Birthplace of My Inner Self,” (内心的故乡 Neixin de guxiang) in The Gold of Previous Incarnations: Notes from My Life, 63-64. 7 Lin Bai, “Where Is Life’s Passion: A Few Words About Things Related to My Writing,” (生命热情何在：与我创作有关的一些词 Shengmeng reqing he zai: yu wo chuangzuo youguan de yixie ci) in The Gold of Previous Incarnations: Notes from My Life, 8. 8 Lin Bai, “Time Has Been Taken from Me Here, Give Me Some Back,” (时光从我这里夺走的，你又还给了我 Shiguang cong wo zheli duo zou de, ni you huan gei le wo) in The Gold of Previous Incarnations, 83. 9 Elfriede Jelinek is an Austrian novelist and playwright. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004. Many of her works have highly political overtones, and often deal with such topics as female sexuality and other feminist tropes. 10 Lin Bai, “Don’t Read Jelinek’s Arguments,” (不读耶利内克的理由 Bu du Yelineikede liyou) in The Gold of Previous Incarnations: Notes from My Life, 192. 11 Lin Bai, “Literature Stands in Front of You,” (文学站在你面前 Wenxue zhanzai ni mianqian) in The Gold of Previous Incarnations: Notes from My Life, 66-67. 12 Lin Bai, “All of the Myriad Wild Things,” (野生的万物 Yesheng de wanwu) in The Gold of Previous Incarnations: Notes from My Life, 92. 13 Lin Bai, “Where Is Life’s Passion: A Few Words About Things Related to My Writing,” 4. 14 Lin Bai, “The World Is So Vast Like This,” (世界如此辽阔 Shijie ruci liaokuo) in The Gold of Previous Incarnations: Notes from My Life, 68.
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15 Lin Bai, One Person’s War, 19: “After a week the weather was clear, and I was in my dormitory casually flipping through a magazine when the voice of one my classmates called in to me: Duomi, there’s a boy here to see you.” 16 See the discussion of One Person’s War in Chapter Two. 17 Lin Bai, One Person’s War, 62. 18 See Chapter One for a further discussion of the difference between privacy writing (sirenhua xiezuo) and individualized writing (gerenhua xiezuo). 19 See Chapter One for a discussion of the Notes from My Life genre, as well as Chapter Two for Patricia Waugh’s discussion of metafiction and the self-begetting novel. 20 Lin Bai, One Person’s War, 32-33. 21 Lin Bai, “Reverie of Death,” (死亡的遐想 Siwang de xiaxiang) in The Gold of Previous Incarnations: Notes from My Life, 137 and One Person’s War, 13. 22 Lin Bai, “Climbing Emei shan Alone” (一个人上峨嵋山 Yigeren shang Emei shan) in The Gold of Previous Incarnations: Notes from My Life, 35 and One Person’s War, 141. 23 Lin Bai, “The Pause in My Education,” (失学的日子 Shixue de rizi) in The Gold of Previous Incarnations: Notes from My Life, 18-20 and One Person’s War, 110-114. Also “Reaching Nanning,” (到达南宁 Daoda Nanning) in The Gold of Previous Incarnations: Notes from My Life, 118-123 and One Person’s War, 57. 24 See note 4 25 Lin Bai, One Person’s War, 6-7; similar dreams about the death of her family members and her wedding can be found in “My Dreams When I Was Little,” (小时候的梦 Xiao shihou de meng) in The Gold of Previous Incarnations: Notes from My Life, 10-12. 26 Lin Bai, One Person’s War, 8; similar fever-induced dreams about rainbows and a black clock given to her by her boyfriend can be found in, “True-Hearted Lovers Cannot Separate,” (同心爱者不能分手 Tongxin aizhe bu neng fenshou) in the Collected Writings of Lin Bai, 154 and “My Dreams When I Was Little,” in The Gold of Previous Incarnations: Notes from My Life, 10-12. 27 Incidentally, Sand Street is where Lin Bai lived in Beiliu from when she was eight years old until she was thirteen. Lin Bai, “Where Is Life’s Passion: A Few Words About Things Related to My Writing,” 2. 28 Lin Bai, One Person’s War, 87-88. See also “True-Hearted Lovers Cannot Separate,” 123-158. Regarding Duomi’s relationship with N and her pregnancy and abortion, see One Person’s War, 174 and the section “Regarding Tears,” (关于眼泪 Guanyu yanlei) in “True-Hearted Lovers Cannot Separate,” 135-137.
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29 Lin Bai, “The Rose Corridor,” (玫瑰过道 Meigui guodao) in The Collected Writings of Lin Bai, 41-42 and One Person’s War, 166. 30 Lin Bai, “The Eye on the Wall,” (墙上的眼睛 Qiangshang de yanjing) in The Collected Writings of Lin Bai, 24. In the whole short story, there is only a single character—older sister (姐 jie)—which points to the narrator’s identity. 31 Lin Bai, “The Eye on the Wall,” 23-24 and The Gold of Previous Incarnations: Notes from My Life, 30. 32 See note 22 33 Lin Bai, One Person’s War, 148 34 Lin Bai, “Some Words for Fang Fang,” 153. 35 Lin Bai, One Person’s War, 151-152. 36 Lin Bai, One Person’s War, 43. See also, One Person’s War, 23. 37 See Lin Bai, One Person’s War, 20 and 22. 38 While Duomi’s feelings for other women are often homoerotic, she never has an actual sexual experience with another woman. Her only experiences touching a woman’s body come from touching her own. 39 Lin Bai, One Person’s War, 3. 40 See Lin Bai, One Person’s War, 27-28. 41 Lin Bai, One Person’s War, 30-31. 42 In fact, her marriage to her husband is mentioned only briefly after her relationship with N ends. And like her other heterosexual partners, Duomi’s husband also remains nameless. See Lin Bai, One Person’s War, 182. 43 Lin Bai, One Person’s War, 17. 44 Lin Bai, One Person’s War, 129. 45 Lin Bai, One Person’s War, 130. 46 Lin Bai, One Person’s War, 172. 47 For her other references to abortion see Lin Bai, One Person’s War, 15, 123, 164, and 174. See also “Related Words: ‘Getting Rid of It,’ ‘Induced Abortion,’ and ‘Termination,’” (有关的词：做掉、人工流产、堕胎 Youguan de ci: zuo diao, rengongliuchan, duotai) in The Gold of Previous Incarnations: Notes from My Life, 182.
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48 Wang, 167. 49 Kay Schaffer and Song Xianlin, “Unruly Spaces: Gender, Women’s Writing and Indigenous Feminism in China,” in Journal of Gender Studies 16 No. 7 (March 2007), 26. 50 Tze-lan D. Sang, “At the Juncture of Censure and Mass Voyeurism: Narratives of Female Homoerotic Desire in Post-Mao China,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8 No. 4, (2002), 544.
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CHAPTER VI
SELF-ISH PASSION: HAI NAN’S A DISSOLUTE LIFE: NOTES FROM MY LIFE
AND MY LOVERS
“No woman poet can avoid talking about her own gender experience. Only on the basis of experience can guesses, hypotheses and fictionalized things be represented.”
Hai Nan, interviewed by Zhang Xiaohong Hai Nan, who was born Su Lihua in Yongsheng in Yunnan in 1962, is considered
one of the most controversial representatives of women’s literature from the 1980s. Like
Can Xue, another of the female avant-garde writers, Hai Nan’s writing is both difficult to
categorize as well as difficult to decipher, as Zhong Xiaohong writes:
Hai Nan has been a controversial public figure since the publication of her poem series ‘Woman’ (Nüren) in 1987. A prolific poet, Hai Nan has published four poetry collections…Hai Nan’s best poetry is characterized by seeming nonsense and near-nonsense, semantic gaps, repetition, the collage of disjointed contexts, fragmentary syntax, and allegories.1
She began writing in 1981, and her first collection of poetry was published in 1987. She
has penned four major poetry collections and more than fifteen novels, including
Woman’s Biography (Nüren zhuan), Private Life (Sishenghuo), and Body Sacrifice
(Shenti ji). While her fiction and poetry often touches on very personal aspects of her life
and memories, she jumps from fragmented piece of narration to fragmented piece of
narration. While there are several striking differences between the two other authors
discussed in this study and Hai Nan’s writing, as will be discussed below, in favoring this
kind of disjointed, almost stream-of-consciousness-style writing, she is able to create a
private space for herself in her fiction that the reading public is not fully able to enter or
understand. As such, Hai Nan represents yet another way in which the female avant-
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garde writers each use their own strategies to write a space of literary privacy for
themselves.
A Dissolute Life: Notes from My Life
Published in 2006, Hai Nan’s A Dissolute Life: Notes from My Life (hereafter
Notes from My Life) is very different from Xu Kun’s Notes from My Life and Lin Bai’s
The Gold of Previous Incarnations: Notes from My Life. In fact, there is more similarity
between Hai Nan’s Notes from My Life and her self-referential novel My Lovers than
there is generically between her writing and the two other authors discussed in this study.
That being said, however, there are still certain aspects of Hai Nan’s Notes from My Life
that both speak to her project of literary privacy in her self-referential fiction, as she says,
“This book records a few of my secret lives from amongst the narration of my
recollections.”2 Even from the very beginning, Hai Nan alerts the reader to the centrality
of privacy in her writing.
Notes from My Life is arranged in four sections: “The Basin I Was Born In,”
Uncovering Love in The Flower Banquet,” “My Body’s Secret Truth,” and “For My
Lovers.”3 Like Lin Bai and Xu Kun, Hai Nan also discusses a range of topics in her
Notes from My Life, including memories of her childhood and her family, her early
interest in writing and the works of other authors who would later inspire her own
writing, marriage, children, and her experiences with love and sex. Like both Lin Bai
and Xu Kun, Hai Nan also devotes a significant amount of space to discussions of her
development as a writer. Like Lin Bai she devotes several essays to her travels,
especially in Yunnan, where she grew up. And like Xu Kun, she also writes about
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Virginia Woolf and the importance of having a room of one’s own. However, unlike Lin
Bai and Xu Kun, Hai Nan does not devote much space in her writing to discussions of the
relationships between men and women or feminism; rather, these topics appear from time
to time, primarily in relation to her writing or to her recollections of certain experiences
in her life.
One of the most prominent themes that Hai Nan writes about in Notes from My
Life is privacy. This is also one of the most striking differences between Hai Nan’s Notes
from My Life and the similar works by both Lin Bai and Xu Kun—while Lin Bai and Xu
Kun do discuss privacy in their fiction and how they work to construct a space of privacy
for themselves, they do not always tackle the subject directly. Hai Nan, on the other hand
often writes quite frankly about her sense of privacy. She frequently mentions her
“private life” (私生活 sishenghuo or 私密生活 simi shenghuo), and how it a necessary
component of her writing, as she does in the “Preface” to Notes from My Life:
It follows impartial time from the enchantment already sent forth from a person’s secret life, just as that wild southern fox follows the lure of its sense of smell, passing that treacherous road of life that is overgrown with weeds. Our intelligence originates from our privilege of private (simi) language so, from the similarity between the enchantment put forth from our bodies and the most private moments in the development of all things, that is a secret which has been ripped open by the burning sun, by the gloom, as well as by the rainy season; it is a secret which emerges from its smashed shell.4
From the very beginning, Hai Nan explains how privacy and secrets are one of the most
important and fundamental parts of her life. This privacy is a source of inspiration as
well as the means by which she creates a language of her own, that is, distinguishes her
voice from others. And yet at the same time this privacy is also obscured, “overgrown
with weeds,” as Hai Nan so poetically describes. She details how knowing that there are
certain aspects of herself and certain experiences that she has had that belong solely to
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her is a source of pleasure. She also links this sense of privacy directly to her physical
body, as in her essay “Bathing Naked.”5 In this essay she describes the tactile sensations
of bathing, as well as the appearance of the other women’s bodies that she sees while
bathing. Far from being voyeuristic, in narrating these experiences Hai Nan invites the
reader into her private world and allows them to experience them with her.
Moreover, in writing about her private experiences, Hai Nan also discusses
Virginia Woolf and the influence of Woolf’s writing. Woolf is significant for Hai Nan in
that she is both influential for writing as well as the way that she talks about women
writing, so much so that when Hai Nan moves to Kunming from Beijing she writes, “In
1991, there were actually no episodes in my obscured private life. The stockpiled words
in my inner being spurred me to steadfastly look forward to a room of my own.”6 In need
of an outlet, Hai Nan writes about the words that have accumulated inside her, and her
need for privacy in order to release them. This is clearly a veiled reference to Woolf’s A
Room of One’s Own, in which Woolf discusses how in order to write well a women must
have a room of her own. Furthermore, Hai Nan goes on to write, in yet another essay,
that:
Virginia Woolf said to her friends, “I must be private, secret; concealing as far as possible my namelessness and sink into oblivion so that I can go on writing.” This is also precisely the state of my existence. During a pause in my writing I go to the flower garden downstairs to walk. Separated by the railings, I can see the slow attitude of the peasants in the fields working. I am absorbed by this attitude. If we can start to slow down in everything, then, then our minds can look for ourselves.7
Here we can see the connections between privacy and writing for Hai Nan—her private,
personal experiences become the material from which she draws inspiration for her
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writing, and in creating a private world for herself in her writing she able to investigate
the most interior aspects of her self.
However, other than Virginia Woolf, Han Nan does not discuss feminism or
overtly political questions of women’s liberation at all in Notes from My Life, although
she does discuss these questions somewhat in interviews, as she does in this one with
Everyone Magazine, “I’ve actually never thought of being a feminist. My writing has no
connection with any ‘ism’ or school of thought.”8 It is interesting that for a writer so
frequently read as a “feminist writer” that she should so utterly avoid the topic. This may
be due to the very frank descriptions of female desire that she offers in works such as My
Lovers, as well as the fact that she often discusses both her own decision to reject
marriage as well as the effect that marriage has on women.
Her own rejection of marriage is a topic which comes up several times in Notes
from My Life, particularly as she discusses her past lovers. For example in her essay,
“Men Should Go Stay in a Hotel,” she talks about a former lover who has asked her to
marry him:
After daybreak, I became another me, rejecting this person who had come from afar to ask my hand in marriage, rejecting his love for me. And before daybreak, I actually snuggled up to him. Maybe in this kind of peaceful or deep sleep I already dreamt about my future with him: we would be separated by a distant country, we would be solitary travelers in two different worlds, we would never have a way to be together or live a truly common life.9
In this essay, the man that Hai Nan has fallen in love with is an artist who lives overseas.
While she is temporarily smitten with him, and with the idea of marrying him, in the end
she decides against it and rejects both the idea and the man himself. Like her other
relationships, she refuses to follow tradition simply for the sake of obeying social norms;
time and time again she insists on her autonomy and agency to choose as the most
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important factor in any of her decisions, whether it be to love someone, to sleep with
them, or to marry.
Similarly, in “Gorgeous Customary Wedding Song,” she writes about her friend
Ding Lili, and her wedding. Ding Lili is a beautiful girl who has decided to use her body
and her looks to marry into a comfortable life, despite the fact that she does not love the
man she is marrying. Hai Nan finds this attitude towards marriage problematic:
When a girl is rushes toward her gorgeous customary wedding car, she can abandon the lively rhythm of her body; she can hide away her bright and beautiful fantasies; she can betray her body’s patterns……Will it leave a mark behind on her body? And yet, in her fashionable dress that she designed for herself I honestly cannot see this kind of mark. She put both her legs up on that motorcycle and followed that man, like the original wedding car that she was stepping onto. Maybe she really didn’t feel the gloom that I felt once, because she has her privacy (simi), she has her ideals, she has the right to choose her own life. So, she is indifferent to life’s changes, since she can use her body and she also can search for happiness for herself.10
Hai Nan feels that Ding Lili’s wedding is a betrayal of herself, that it will force her to
hide or change the natural state or desires of her body in order to suit her husband.
However, despite her difficulty understanding Ding Lili’s decision to marry, and her own
concerns that it will adversely affect Ding Lili’s bodily happiness, Hai Nan also writes
that it is Ding Lili’s own private decision to do so. As such, she implies that it is in
embracing one’s own private desires that a person, and especially a woman, is able to
find herself, or at least provides a means for a woman to search for her own happiness.
As such, Hai Nan implies a kind of feminist position which makes a woman’s right to
choose paramount. This right to choose, however, is grounded in a woman’s autonomous
self, and the freedom to use that privacy to make whatever decisions for herself that she
feels are best.
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Moreover, while marriage is not a choice that Hai Nan makes for herself, in “The
Small-Town Man Seeking My Hand in Marriage,” she recounts the story of one of her
former lovers, a writer from a small town who eventually asks for Hai Nan to marry him.
Once again she refuses him, because she knows that she has already given herself to her
writing:
I refuse to walk into a marriage birdcage, and yet I know I have no way to resist writing. I want to write. This is something I originally simply couldn’t imagine. When other people hear this it doesn’t sound like wishful thinking; it’s mythic. And yet, on that dawn when I suddenly awoke I was destined to enter that blue shadowed path…11
Unlike Lin Bai and Xu Kun, Hai Nan never discusses her relationship status outright. It
is difficult to tell simply from reading Notes from My Life if she eventually married or
not; while she openly discusses her previous relationships with men, she does not touch
on this topic except in those cases where she has refused to marry. It is also not a subject
which she discusses in her interviews. And while some of the photographs that are
included in Notes from My Life would seem to be of her child, these too are not captioned
in such a way as to clarify the point. This is yet another difference between Hai Nan’s
Notes from My Life and both Lin Bai’s and Xu Kun’s: Lin Bai only mentions her husband
in passing but writes frequently about her daughter, and Xu Kun’s divorce is a common
topic of discussion. Hai Nan, on the other hand preserves her marital status as a part of
her private self, hidden from the reader. In all three cases, however, these writers decide
what information and to what extent they will allow the reader access to their private
lives; moreover, they all distance themselves from being defined by their marital status.
In this way, although these three authors approach the question differently, they all use
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the idea of privacy to create an identity for themselves that is not defined by their
relationships with men.
Like Lin Bai and Xu Kun, Hai Nan also spends a great deal of time discussing
women’s bodies. In fact, more then either of the other two writers, Hai Nan’s sense of
self and writing are completely grounded in her own body. Her descriptions of female
desire are far more vivid than either Lin Bai and Xu Kun; this will be discussed further
below. And while Hai Nan clearly revels in her own physical being, and uses this
physicality as a means to access her private self as well as create a space of privacy for
herself in her writing, she rejects the idea that her body has a biologically predetermined
purpose:
Women’s reproductive organs are for creating life. In addition to this, they are for having sex and having periods…this melody of happiness and pain which has always been born by women’s flesh and blood, as far as I am concerned, is completely distant from me.12
Although it is possible, as discussed above, that Hai Nan has actually had a child, as
some of the photos in Notes from My Life would seem to indicate, it is not a topic which
she discusses in any detail. Rather, her depictions of female bodies take one of two
forms: discussions of her own body in connection with discussions of her desire, and
descriptions of other women’s bodies. Like Lin Bai, Hai Nan is fascinated with and
enchanted by other women’s bodies. Several of the essays in Notes from My Life deal
with public bathing, a topic which also comes up frequently for Lin Bai. Both authors
also discuss their childhood fascination with brassieres, an article of clothing which in
and of itself suggests adult womanhood. As Hai Nan writes:
Curious, I slid down the wall. My good friend, a girl in pigtail braids and born the same month and year as I, gasped quietly. This caused me to catch sight of that spotlessly white brassiere drying in the sun on the iron wire in the compound. My
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girlfriend pressed close to me and whispered in my ear that her mother also wore this kind of brassiere; only hers wasn’t as spotlessly white as this one, or as big. Clearly, at our age brassieres were unfamiliar, no more than a small article of clothing. As far as we were concerned, brassieres had no private (simi) significance……In the end, when a woman becomes naked to herself—this isn’t a philosophical question, but simply a private bodily question.13
As Hai Nan points out, it is not the brassiere on its own that holds any private
significance, but rather what it suggests, that is, both motherhood and female sexuality. It
indicates a girl’s transition into womanhood, and her ability to desire, as well as to
produce life. And once again, for Hai Nan the process by which a woman comes into
possession of her own body, the same process which makes a brassiere strangely
fascinating, is a private one that each woman must determine for herself. Once again, she
resists reading this process as what she calls a “philosophical question,” that is, she
refuses to link this process to any particular school of thought whether it be feminist or
heteronormative, for example, but rather highlights a woman’s bodily privacy as the key
past of coming into possession of herself.
In addition to being the site and source of a woman’s privacy, Hai Nan also
discusses at length the connection between her body and her writing. For her, the need to
write springs from somewhere deep inside her:
I don’t know why my body is permeated with unceasing desire to write poetry. Maybe I am inherently able to write poetry; only when I have put down in writing those poetic records will the poetic desire within my body ease. Besides writing poetry there is also reading; there have been so many times when I have turned over and stroked gently a book’s cover. This really is heaven on earth.14
Writing, her body, and desire are all linked together for Hai Nan—they are more than just
her profession, but rather a physical imperative. She draws not only inspiration but also
pleasure from other authors’ works that she has read, as well as from her own bodily
sensations and desires. And she is able to draw from all of these aspects to create a space
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of privacy for herself in her fiction. While she does not devote as much time to
discussions of her development as a writer as do both Xu Kun and Lin Bai, it is clear that
her interest in poetry and writing developed from an early age and have been a
fundamental part of who she is ever since. In almost every essay in Notes from My Life
Hai Nan mentions some experience that she had or book that she read which has had an
influence on her as a poet, and later on her fiction. She speaks more directly to this in an
interview:
In this world, everyone can send out their own voice. I only hope my voice can be different from anyone else’s. If my readers can distinguish my voice from the multitude of others, then I am really Hai Nan. Writers “giving their readers an electric shock” is a social phenomenon driven by economic interests; every writer can make their own choice.15
The interviewer had asked her about her writing style, and if she feels that her writing
really can be distinguished from that of other authors. Given Hai Nan’s ultimate goal,
her answer is not surprising. Rather than commercialize her writing, as will be discussed
in regard to the body/beauty writers in the following chapter, or force her writing to fit a
mold so that she might be labeled as part of a faction or “ism,” as discussed above, Hai
Nan uses her own unique voice as a way to express herself, a way to create a space for
herself in her writing which belongs only to her. While her writing style is completely
unique and unlike any of the other avant-garde writers, in resisting both
commercialization as well as being labeled but rather pursuing her own project of self-
narration Hai Nan shares the same project as the other female avant-garde writers—that
of the creation of a space of si-privacy in their fiction.
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My Lovers
There is a significant amount of overlap between A Dissolute Life: Notes from My
Life and My Lovers. In fact, the fourth section of Notes from My Life, “For My Lovers,”
covers several of Hai Nan’s most significant relationships, all of which appear within the
pages of My Lovers, as well be discussed below. In an interview with Zhang Hong, Hai
Nan explains why she decided to write My Lovers:
At the beginning of the 1990s I wrote My Lovers; who was I then?...At that time I was immersed in writing about “male-female” relationships….We must admit that from the time we are born, we live in “male female” relationships. We see our parents’ “male-female” relationships, see our relationships with our fathers, see the “male-female” relationships of our neighbors to either side. This is our earliest introduction to our long period of “male-female” relationships.16
And it is clear from the content of My Lovers that Hai Nan is using many of her own
personal experiences to work out her feelings about male-female relationships, as well as
deal with some of the pain that these relationships have caused her. At the same time,
however, just as with the works of the other avant-garde women writers, it is too much to
read My Lovers as an autobiographical or semi-autobiographical work. Rather, Hai Nan
uses references to herself and her lived experience as a way to create the private space
that she has written so much about in Notes from My Life, as she says in an interview
with Liu Yilin:
I asked, “In regard to this reality of this work, what do you have to say?” Hai Nan replied, “Perhaps My Lovers is a true story, and maybe it is a made up one. No matter what, all of the stories and characters in my novel exist; the reader only needs to earnestly recall briefly their own lives and they will discover that the scenarios in my novel can be seen everywhere, even in themselves.17
For Hai Nan, what is important about My Lovers is not whether or not the men that Su
Xiu has relationships with are actual men out of Hai Nan’s own past, but rather that in the
narration of these relationships Hai Nan is able to create a private space for herself. This
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private space is one which Hai Nan hopes her readers will be able to identify with,
although as discussed above, if they are not able to understand of identify with what she
writes this is not her concern; as she points out:
I seldom take readers into account in the course of writing. Once setting my pen to paper, I fall into a forgetful state, not consciously, but automatically. Writing is an autonomous act. It is like a labyrinth. Authors who have entered their self-created labyrinths are no longer connected with external reality.18
Rather than being an act of communication directed at an “other,” for Hai Nan the
primary function of writing is to give a voice to the sensation, emotions, and experiences
that she has had—her so-called “private life”—whether it is in her poetry, her prose, or
her fiction.
Perhaps the best way to introduce My Lovers is by looking back to Notes from My
Life and the fourth section of that book titled, “For My Lovers.” Hai Nan writes:
The third love song in my private life is related to trains. I was sitting in the train compartment. I am in love with taking trains, and because of this by myself, bored and fanciful, I got on the train at a small train station called Yuanmou next to the Jinsha River. My first love song came about because of my love for a stove and my secret love for a blacksmith; the second love song came about because of I was fascinated with a bicycle and captivated by the man who rode it; and the third love song, because I am fascinated with trains, I secretly loved the passenger who was sitting next to me.19
The various relationships that Hai Nan mentions here, and in this whole section of her
Notes from My Life provide clues to reading the relationships she narrates in My Lovers.
It is difficult to summarize the plot of My Lovers as Hai Nan moves randomly
from the stories of one lover to the next, often in the middle of that story. These jumps
usually occur in a stream-of-consciousness fashion, as something about the situation she
is describing will remind her of another person or another situation and immediately the
first story is left behind and the second story takes its place. These jumps also move
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backwards and forwards in time, so it is very difficult to get a sense of linear chronology.
Instead the novel focuses mainly on Su Xiu, the heroine, and three of the most important
men who have passed through her life: Charley (Qiaoli), Hao, and Jie. While he was not
the first man that she had fallen in love with, Charley is the first very intense, very
serious relationship that Su Xiu has. They part ways after he asks her to marry him and
she refuses, although after his death it is unclear if he was already married at the time and
Su Xiu was his mistress. After Su Xiu starts seeing Hao she learns that Charley has died
in a motorcycle accident, and she is devastated. All of her relationship with Charley is
narrated in the form of recollections of him after his death.
After Charley comes Hao, a younger man who has the longest relationship with
Su Xiu. He is twenty-two years old and she is twenty-eight, and they live together in
Beijing. He is also from south China, just like Su Xiu. They are together for quite a
while, and just like Charley before him, Hao asks Su Xiu to marry him. Again she
refuses, and eventually Hao leaves her for a younger woman named Feifei. Feifei goes
crazy, however, and Hao is forced to put her in a mental institution. Although they never
date again, Hao and Su Xiu remain very close, and he is often the first person that she
turns to in times of distress.
After her break up with Hao, Su Xiu returns to Yunnan. Some time later, Su Xiu
meets a man named Jie, and they begin to date. At the time when they meet, Jie is in love
with another woman named Xiao, but she does not love him back. Su Xiu had also been
in a previous, short-lived relationship with a man named Le who was in love with another
woman (named Wan); as soon as Su Xiu found this out she broke off her relationship
with Le. However, while Jie is love with Xiao, she is not in love with him and has
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actually run away from the city that they are living in to get away from him. Slowly Jie
forgets Xiao and falls in love with Su Xiu, and like her two other serious boyfriends
before him, eventually asks her to marry him. While she initially resists him, he tells her
that he is going to build a house for her next to the ocean modeled after a house that she
has described in one of her poems. Because of this, for the first time, Su Xiu actually
considers it, saying:
Marriage, this is the first time that I had carefully considered marriage….marriage is a man and a woman set on an island, carefully separating the great things and the minutia of the world. The final point in resolving a man and woman’s relationship is marriage, and yet, how can one approach and continuously escape from this method of resolution?20
Moved by his connection to her poetry that has given him a deeper insight into who she
is, she eventually tells him that she will marry him someday, although this does not come
to pass as he too eventually dies. He does leave her the house by the seaside, however.
All in all Hai Nan also narrates Su Xiu’s fifteen lovers; in addition to Charley, Hao, and
Jie there are: Mancun, Xiazi, Le, Hongye, a stranger she has a one-night stand with,
Chao, Yan, Lashi, Haiming, Yi, Ding, and Nameless. She also narrates the stories of
several fictitious men: Si, Wo, Po, Mingsheng, Mi, Langmao, Leming, and Zhongfu.
Sometimes these men are fantasy lovers of hers, and sometimes they are men she
imagines for other women; for example she imagines Xiao’s love for a man named Si in
one of these episodes as the reason why Xiao does not love Jie. Some of the men’s
stories are narrated through the course of the novel and some of their stories are very
short. For example, Hongye, the man she loses her virginity to warrants little more than a
few pages, while the stranger with whom she has a one-night stand gets his own small
section of a chapter. Mancun was the first man that she ever really loved, and the novel
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begins with a short piece of their story, before switching quite quickly and abruptly to Su
Xiu’s story with Hao. Mancun was also the first of her lovers to die; of the fifteen lovers
that Su Xiu has within the pages of the novel, roughly half of them are dead. These are
Mancun, Charley, Hongye, Haiming, and Yi; the last time that Su Xiu sees him he is
waiting to die.
Like the self-referential works of the other avant-garde female writers, Hai Nan
uses many details from her own life to narrate Su Xiu’s life. The first connection
between the two is that they share a family name, and are both from Yunnan, near the
Jinsha River. They were also both born in the same year and are both poets.
Additionally Su Xiu moves back and forth between Yunnan and Beijing at roughly the
same points in her life as Hai Nan does, although given the difficulty of identifying a
concrete chronology in the novel, this is somewhat harder to make out. It is also probable
that several of the really meaningful relationships that Su Xiu has in My Lovers have
been based on similarly important relationships that Hai Nan describes in Notes from My
Life. Su Xiu’s love for Mancun, an older man, springs from his ability to play the
bamboo flute, just as Hai Nan describes in “Love Story 1982.” It is likely that Hao is
modeled after the man that Hai Nan describes in “Fourteen Year-Old Love Song,” as
both men are blacksmiths. Similarly, in “Sea Dyke” she describes her relationship with a
man named Jian, who probably became the inspiration for Charley—both men die in car
accidents. By revealing certain details and concealing or obscuring other, just as in the
cases of Lin Bai and Xu Kun, this self-reference allows Hai Nan to create a space of
privacy in not only My Lovers, also one which exists between My Lovers and Notes from
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My Life. Much like Lin Bai’s writing, this web may extend to Hai Nan’s other writing as
well.
Although My Lovers is not written in the more linear “self-begetting”
metafictional form in which the works of Lin Bai and Xu Kun are written, nevertheless
she still uses many of the same narrative techniques to create her private space of self in
her fiction. The most powerful of these are her descriptions of female desire. Unlike Xu
Kun’s more academic treatment of female desire as an expression of female
empowerment, and Lin Bai’s homosocial/homoerotic descriptions of female-female
desire and female self-desire, Hai Nan’s descriptions wholeheartedly embrace
heterosexual sex. Her narration of Su Xiu’s sexual feelings is very open and frank;
however, far from being the self-exploitative descriptions of sex that the body/beauty
writers offer in the pages of their fiction, Hai Nan’s descriptions of Su Xiu sexual
feelings includes the same uplifting aspects of qing that Lin Bai writes about in relation
to Lin Duomi. For example, Hai Nan describes one of Su Xiu’s encounters with
Mancun:
That afternoon when I shut my eyes tightly and laid down in Mancun’s arms, I saw flock after flock of migratory birds circling above our heads. The migratory birds made my body produce an unfathomably mysterious desire—as if to say that it wasn’t actually Mancun but the birds above our heads that helped me enter a kind of carnal desire that day. From that point on, every time I saw or dreamt about migratory birds circling above my head I would have the intense desire to have a man enter my body. Maybe is was the sounds of their wings flapping in elation that caused my body to be full of passion and desire. Consequently I came to a mysterious conclusion: men’s reproductive organs are their wings, which is also to say that the wings they use to fly are not their two arms, but rather their radiant, bizarre, poetic organs.21
Su Xiu’s desire and sexual delight allow her to take flight just like the birds that she sees
overhead. Her desire is a release rather than a burden. Moreover, Hai Nan only focuses
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on Su Xiu’s desire, rather than Mancun’s—she delights in her own body and the pleasure
that it gives her. Su Xiu has similar feelings for Hao, as Hai Nan describes:
A sexual rendezvous signifies that a person has already started to weave rings of light into their private life. A beautiful private life leads to the overthrow many of the obstacles in life. Their secrecy does not have a purpose, only the happiness and grief of the creator and collector of their secrecy.22
For Su Xiu, sexual pleasure is one of the fundamental aspects of her private life, and one
of the ways in which a woman is able to search for her inner being. Given Hai Nan’s
own feelings about the connections between her physical body, privacy, and self-
representation, this connection is also not surprising.
Moreover, most of the descriptions of sexual behavior in My Lovers centers on Su
Xiu and her desires; like the other female avant-garde writers when Hai Nan narrates
male desire it is often colored by a certain sense of negativity, whether it be that the man
is only taking advantage of Su Xiu for his pleasure, or that he is trying to bend her desires
to his will and keep her with him. For example, at one point, after Hao has told Su Xiu
how pretty she is, she starts to wonder at what point in her life she became attractive to
men:
When was it after all that I became a woman? When was it after all that men started to praise my legs and fecund navel as well as my breasts?...When was it after all that at the same time men started to praise me they also sent me roses, necklaces, and love letters written in elegant style, full of beautiful symbolic significance? When was it after all that my navel would give off the sound of rustling silk? When men were confronted with their pitch-black sleepiness they would breathe, with their noses they would sniff the fantastic scent of my body; they were constantly breathing in the fragrance of my breasts and the faint blue light coming out from between my legs.23
In these moments, rather than focus on Su Xiu’s delight in her own body and her feelings
of pleasure, Hai Nan describes Su Xiu’s female body as the means by which the men
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around her reach some goal of their own, regardless of her desire. At one point Su Xiu
wonders if the men she has had sex with are simply looking for a path back to their
mothers’ wombs via her body; likewise, after one her short-lived relationship with Le
ends, Su Xiu remarks that when they would have sex, she knew that he was simply trying
to forget his love for Wan. And at yet another point, Su Xiu wonders what drives men’s
behavior with women, after Jie has unexpectedly brought her flowers:
Men, oh men! Men’s dreams and actions are related. Men always turn their dreams into reality, for example, sending a bouquet of fresh flowers to a woman. Flowers represent love, and even more significantly symbolize their dreams. They like the vitality of these fresh flowers, because they hope that a flower can represent a woman’s life.24
While Hai Nan does not explore the range of alternative female desire in the same way
that Lin Bai and Xu Kun do, she does portray Su Xiu’s desire in a way that is not usually
represented within the boundaries of the heterosexual wife and mother: Su Xiu does not
marry, she has multiple sexual partners, some of whom are strangers, and she delights in
the physical pleasure of the body. As such, her narratives of female desire in My Lovers
are as much ones of resistance as are the other avant-garde women writers’.
Su Xiu’s lifestyle choices also extend to the realm of reproduction. While she is
disinterested in marriage, Su Xiu would have been willing to be a mother, as she says:
I was pregnant once, that was something that happened when I was 25 or 26. I didn’t tell anyone, even the father of the child. I came to the seaside thinking I would live alone for a while. I wanted to have my child, but later on I had a miscarriage, I don’t know why.25
Like Lin Bai’s brief mention of her husband, Su Xiu’s mention of her lost child takes up
less than a page, and the child’s father is never named. However, it is interesting that
had the child been carried to term Su Xiu would have chosen to raise the child as a single
mother; this kind of lifestyle choice can be thought of as the opposite end of the spectrum
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from Mao Zhen’s decision to live as a single, childless woman (or even a married woman
with no children). In all three cases, these female characters resist the socially proscribed
image of heterosexual wife and mother, offering instead depictions of alternative ways
that women choose to live their lives. In this way, Su Xiu’s rejection of marriage but
temporary choice to be a mother is very much a part of the female avant-garde writers’
project of resistance.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have considered how Hai Nan’s writing is both similar to and
very different from the other works of the female avant-garde writers represented in this
study. While Hai Nan does offer graphic depictions of empowered, uplifting female
desire as the other avant-garde women writers do, she does not portray heterosexual
desire in the same kind of threatening or destructive way that Lin Bai and Xu Kun do.
And while Hai Nan discusses the importance of privacy at length, she resists any
connection to larger social movements or concern for women in particular, as Lin Bai and
Xu Kun do in their respective Notes from My Life volumes. However, in describing the
connections between her body and her writing, Hai Nan does touch on some of these
topics, and imply their importance. Perhaps the most striking difference between Hai
Nan’s work and those of the other avant-garde women writers is in the way that Hai Nan
plays with language and form in her writing—it would be interesting to compare Hai
Nan’s fiction with the writing of another female avant-garde writer known for her
abstract and fragmented fiction: Can Xue. Despite the differences between Hai Nan’s
self-referential fiction and that of the other writers considered here, it is clear that they are
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all using their own unique voices to create for themselves a space of si-privacy in their
fiction, a space which functions both as resistance to the patriarchal image of the female
body and voice, as well a space where these women can narrate themselves.
Notes 1 Zhang Xiaohong, “Far and Away: Three Authors from Yunnan,” HAS Newsletter #34 (July 2004). 2 Hai Nan, “Preface,” (序 Xu) in A Dissolute Life: Notes from My Life (水性生活：我的人生笔记 Shuixing shenghuo: wode rensheng biji), 1. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine and remain as close to Hai Nan’s original wording as possible. 3 Literally, hua’er yan 花儿宴. Hua’er can also refer to a kind of folksong popular in Gansu, Qinghai, and Ningxia; given Hai Nan’s relative proximity (in Yunnan), it is also possible that she is referring to this style of music. 4 Hai Nan,” Preface,” 2. 5 Hai Nan, “Bathing Naked,” (裸身沐浴 Luo shen muyu) in A Dissolute Life: Notes from My Life, 36-40. 6 Hai Nan, “Renting a Small Room,” (出租小屋 Chuzu xiao wu) in A Dissolute Life: Notes from My Life, 207. 7 Hai Nan, “From Now to the Future,” (从现在到将来 Cong xianzai dao jianglai) in A Dissolute Life: Notes from My Life, 221. 8 “A Dialogue with Hai Nan: The Magic Spectacle of Language,” last modified July 19, 2007, http://mastermag.blog.sohu.com/55952300.html 9 Hai Nan, “Men Should Go Stay in a Hotel,” (男人应该去住旅店 Nanren yinggai qu zhu lüdian) in A Dissolute Life: Notes on My Life, 100. 10 The Chinese literally reads, “she can search for happiness for her own body.” Hai Nan, “Gorgeous Customary Wedding Song,” (艳俗的婚礼曲 Yan su de hunli qu) in A Dissolute Life: Notes from My Life, 144. 11 Hai Nan, “A Small-Town Man Seeking My Hand in Marriage,” (求婚的小镇男人 Qiuhun de xiaozhen nanren) in A Dissolute Life: Notes from My Life, 159. 12 Hai Nan, “The Body on the Horsecart,” (马车上的身体 Ma che shang de shenti) in A Dissolute Life: Notes from My Life, 28.
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13 Hai Nan, “Me, the Voyeur,” (偷窥者的我 Toukuizhe de wo) in A Dissolute Life: Notes from My Life, 117-118. 14 Hai Nan, “Countryside School,” (田园学校 Tianyuan xuexiao) in A Dissolute Life: Notes from My Life, 202. 15 “A Dialogue with Hai Nan: The Magic Spectacle of Language,” last modified July 19, 2007, http://mastermag.blog.sohu.com/55952300.html 16 Zhang Hong, “Conversation: Talking about Men and Women with Hai Nan,” posted on Hai Nan’s blog, February 8, 2009. http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4adc86af0100buly.html 17 Liu Yilin, “Preface One: Composing a Religion of Ourselves,” in Hai Nan, My Lovers (我的情人们 Wode qingrenmen), 6. 18 Zhang Hong, “Conversation: Talking about Men and Women with Hai Nan,” posted on Hai Nan’s blog, February 8, 2009. 19 Hai Nan, “Love Story 1987, Part 1,” (恋曲一九八七（之一） Lianqu yi jiu ba qi (zhiyi)) in A Dissolute Life: Notes from My Life, 188. 20 Hai Nan, My Lovers, 276. 21 Hai Nan, My Lovers, 43. 22 Hai Nan, My Lovers, 106. 23 Hai Nan, My Lovers, 45. 24 Hai Nan, My Lovers, 261. 25 Hai Nan, My Lovers, 274.
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CHAPTER VII
CONCLUSION:
PUBLIC EXPOSURE: THE BODY WRITERS AND WOMEN’S “SELF-WRITING” “I said, ‘You know, sweetie, you’re like a novel, with all your plot twists, always leading
me down some new path.’” —Mian Mian, Candy
“My body fluids were becoming black ink, oozing out of me into my pen, trickling into
each word and phrase I wrote.” —Wei Hui, Shanghai Baby
Throughout this study I have argued that, while they each construct this space in
different ways, the goal of the female avant-garde writers is to create a space of literary
space of resistance in their fiction, a place where they are not bound to nor determined by
heteronormative patriarchal social expectations of what a women should be. Moreover, I
have argued that in creating this space for themselves in their fiction, that the female
avant-garde writers have taken the overly-selfish traditionally negative concept of si and
turned it into a positive tool for narrative female bodies and female voices which have not
been overwritten by the symbolic and metaphorical meanings ascribed to women by male
intellectuals and the state. Each of the three authors examined in this study use have their
own styles and voices; from Xu Kun’s works which have been heavily influenced by
theory to Lin Bai’s “misty” web of poetic prose, to Hai Nan’s lyrical romances, each
author has her own unique and distinctive method for creating in her fiction this space of
literary si-privacy. At the same time, all three authors also make use of similar
techniques to create this space. They have all written works of self-referential
metafiction, often using the so-called “self-begetting” form to narrate a female self who
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shares significant overlap with the author’s own life, but yet which remains a work of
fiction rather than autobiography. They also all portray heteronormative relationships in
a negative way: for Mao Zhen, the heroine of Xu Kun’s The Twenty-Two Nights of
Spring, patriarchal culture has made not only all of the men in her life “sick” but also she
herself, and she decides that it is better to live a solitary life rather than be involved in
another damaging relationship. In Lin Bai’s One Person’s War, Lin Duomi learns after
several painful encounters with men in which they attempt to rape her, lie to her, or take
advantage of her both physically and emotionally that heteronormative relationships are
not a source of refuge for her. While Duomi ultimately marries, it is her relationships
with women and with herself where she finds beauty. And Hai Nan’s Su Xiu, in My
Lovers again and again falls for men who die, leaving her alone and heartbroken. Rather,
all three writers have their protagonists choose to express their desire in alternative ways
to the socially proscribed heterosexual wife and mother; Mao Zhen is a divorcée who
chooses to live alone; Lin Duomi marries, but ultimately derives her greatest sexual
gratification from pleasuring herself, and Su Xiu refuses to marry, preferring to take a
series of lovers instead.1 This refusal to portray their female protagonists fulfilling the
socially normative roles of wife and mother is just one way in which these authors create
their space of literary si-privacy in their fiction as one of resistance.
The female avant-garde writers’ project of literary si-privacy becomes much
clearer when compared with the generation of writers who begin writing in the 1990s: the
so-called “body” or “beauty” writers. Heavily influenced by the increasing
commercialism present in cultural production in the 1990s, Kay Schaffer and Song Xialin
describe the body/beauty writers as:
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A very different group of globally-connected, urban-based writers offer new perspectives on contemporary Chinese women. Young writers, like Wei Hui and Mian Mian born in the 1970s, marked the new millennium with a host of so-called ‘bad girl’ novels, aimed at both local Chinese and global markets. Totally absorbed in Western modernity, their novels engage the reader in fantasies of freedom, autonomy, sex, drugs, spending, and self-expressive hedonism.2
While the body/beauty writers are often read by critics in a similar fashion, it becomes
clear in that while the female avant-garde writers resist the male gaze by portraying
alternative forms of female desire, the body/beauty writers use both male desire and the
male gaze to gain public recognition. I will return to this point below, in examining two
representative works of the body/beauty writing genre: Mian Mian’s Candy and Wei
Hui’s Shanghai Baby.
Additionally, all three of the avant-garde women writers discussed here write
details of their own lives into the lives of their female protagonists. Because of this
overlap between author and character, these works are often misread as autobiographies.
However, as discussed in Chapter I, there is a fundamental difference between the
publicly-oriented autobiographical form, and the self-referential fiction of the female
avant-garde writers. Once again, it is informative to compare the works of the female
avant-garde writers to the semi-autobiographical fiction of the body/beauty writers. As
Shaffer and Song point out:
Even though Wei Hui and Mian Mian differ considerably in the content and style of their writing, they are often mentioned together as representatives of the new ‘body writing’ in China. Both write provocative, sexually explicit prose, both narcissistically exploit their own appearance as women, and both have reaped substantial financial rewards. Their fiction challenges thousands of years of women’s sexual repression and the neutering of women’s sexuality during the Cultural Revolution.3
Both Mian Mian’s heroine Hong and Wei Hui’s heroine Nikki (Ni Ke; also known as
Coco) display a high degree of overlap with the authors’ own lives. And yet it is
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interesting that neither work is read as autobiography, whereas one of the main criticisms
leveled at the works of the female avant-garde writers is that the autobiographical works
discussed in this study are lacking in any literary value. Ultimately, although both Mian
Mian’s and Wei Hui’s works have been banned in Mainland China for their overt
descriptions of sexual behavior, a closer look at how they portray their relationship with
self-narration is a necessary point of comparison for understanding both the differences
between the body/beauty writers and the avant-garde women writers, as well as one
which helps to clarify the avant-garde women writers’ project of literary privacy as being
separate and distinct from the body/beauty writers’ desire for public recognition.
Finally, it is in considering how the female avant-garde writers and the
body/beauty writers position themselves with regard to feminism that differences
between the two groups of writers become clear. Many scholars, and in particular
Western scholars, tend to read the body/beauty writers’ depictions of female sexuality as
politically motivated, as Zhong Xueping illustrates:
[A] Group of young women writers—collectively known as meinü zuojia (or “beauty writers”) and including the author of Shanghai Baby—emerged and have most positively, and publicly, identified with ‘feminism’.4
Zhong is not incorrect in asserting that the body/beauty writers are engaging in a feminist
project of visibility when they openly and bluntly discuss their sexual desire and sexual
behavior. However, much like the situation faced by young women who “eat the rice
bowl of youth” discussed in Chapter II, the question becomes to what extent they resist
the male gaze in asserting their own desire, and to what extent they invite it. Shaffer and
Song summarize this precarious position, saying:
Although asserting women’s autonomy, these women refuse notions of female sisterhood or solidarity. They wear their ‘feminism’ diffidently, often engaging in
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public spats, sometimes on the Internet to an audience of thousands. Their sexualized performances of femininity, their self-fashioning as beauty objects, their enactments of sexual rivalry between themselves both challenge and enhance phallocentric notions of woman-as-other.5
Indeed, much like the corporeal feminism espoused by Li Xiaojiang, the recent
commercialization of cultural production in China makes answering this question very
difficult. In fact, the idea of the empowered female consumer, and even cultural producer
has become so synonymous with the male gaze as to spawn a whole range of related
terms, as Gary Xu and Susan Feiner point out:
Economic growth in China is no exception, and the term meinü, meaning beautiful women, is an example of this process. A popular prefix, it is used to form many new compounds regularly used in casual conversation, state-sponsored media, the press, and the Internet. The Chinese language now includes dozens of words with the prefix meinü, such as meinü zuojia (beautiful woman writer)…all of them express the acceptance of the male gaze. In China, as in other patriarchal cultures, the male gaze reinforces the social construction of woman as “other,” and the “object” of history and culture, rather than as the agent of her own subjectivity.6
Rather than try to sort out whether the body/beauty writers are ultimately engaged in a
resisting or upholding the male gaze in their works, it is more informative for
understanding the differences between the female avant-garde writers and the
body/beauty writers to look at how the authors themselves position themselves
politically, vis a vis feminism. In addition to looking at expressions of female desire and
self-narration in Mian Mian’s and Wei Hui’s works, this too will be an important point of
distinction below.
Mian Mian’s Candy and the New Liumang
In 1997 Mian Mian published her first novel, La la la, which according to
Jonathan Napack, “[S]poke (not surprisingly) of love, music, drugs, and despair in
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Shenzhen.”7 Then in 1999, Mian Mian published her semi-autobiographical novel
Candy, which contains a lot of the same subject material and tells the story of Hong,
whose life parallels Mian Mian’s own. Mian Mian is often considered a representative
voice of the body/beauty writing genre, particularly because of her very graphic
depictions of rebellious female behavior. In addition to reading Mian Mian as a
body/beauty writer, it is important to understand her rebellion. This, in turn, helps us to
understand her motivations for writing and how her writing, as representative of other
body/beauty writers, differs from that of the female avant-garde writers.
Although she does not specifically describe herself as such, Mian Mian portrays
Hong in Candy as part of the urban liumang, or “hooligan,” subculture. As Geremie
Barmé explains:
Liumang is a word with some of the most negative connotations in the Chinese language. Here the expression is used loosely in an attempt to describe both a social phenomenon and its cultural refraction….The term liumang has a venerable pedigree in modern Chinese urban life, appearing as early as a century ago when it was first used to describe the rootless rowdies and petty criminals who plagued the growing port of Shanghai. This definition was expanded to include a range of sexual misdemeanours, giving the term its most common range of meanings today.8
The “rootless rowdies and petty criminals” that Barmé describes here can easily include
the group of young Shenzhen natives and Shanghainese who have relocated to Shenzhen
that Mian Mian writes about in Candy.
In the novel, Mian Mian tells the story of Hong, a young middle class
Shanghainese girl. After a classmate commits suicide when they are sixteen, Hong drops
out of school and eventually finds her way to Shenzhen where she begins trying to find
ways to get rich. At a café one day she meets a young man named Saining, and quite
quickly they begin seeing each other. Their relationship is very intense—he frequently
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cheats on her and they frequently break up only to get back together. They live a feckless
life, working when they need to, usually playing music in clubs, in order to pay for their
alcohol and marijuana. However, this is a fairly happy time for Hong, and her
relationship with Saining is much deeper than their superficial fighting would indicate.
Things for Hong and Saining start to change after they travel to Beijing to
perform. Hong leaves early, and Saining comes back to Shenzhen addicted to heroin.
While Hong does try heroin with Saining that night she is unimpressed, and begins to
pressure him to go to rehab. Eventually he agrees, and while he is gone, Hong begins to
drink heavily. When Saining is released from rehab their relationship has changed and he
soon goes back to using heroin; Hong for her part has become a functional alcoholic.
Their destructive relationship continues until one particularly intense fight, after which
Hong moves out and they end their relationship for what seems like the final time.
However, as in the past, after some time apart Saining and Hong begin to spend more
time together, and together they both decide to give up their respective addictions: he,
heroin, and she, alcohol. When he starts using heroin yet again, Hong throws him out
and this time he disappears for real. Heartbroken and lost, Hong decides to become a
heroin addict herself, and she does exactly that. Her parents take her to Shanghai and put
her in rehab at one point, and as soon as she is discharged she immediately returns to
Shenzhen and starts using heroin again. She even loses her voice to her addiction, and is
never able to sing again. Finally, after being beaten up and having all of her hair shaved
off, Hong returns again to Shanghai with her father who has come to put her in rehab
once more.
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This time Hong is successful in her attempt to quit using heroin, and it is also
around this time that Saining reappears in her life. He too has stopped using heroin, and
has been traveling. It is at this time that Hong starts writing: first, as a kind of
prescription to maintain her sobriety, and eventually as a way to find herself. And while
Hong and Saining remain a part of each other’s lives, their relationship never goes back
to the way it was in the beginning—they are never able to recapture their lost love.
Hong’s writing begins to attract some attention, and she publishes her first novel. She
also faces an AIDS scare with one of her close friends, has her first orgasm, and starts
running. Slowly but surely Hong comes into possession of herself, all the while
capturing the process in her writing. The novel ends with Hong and Saining discussing
their failed love, and Hong promising to write a novel for Saining.
Considering the cast of characters who appear in Candy, it is easy to see how the world
that Mian Mian describes is populated by a new generation of liumang; her friends in
both Shenzhen and Shanghai include a motley crew of musicians, artists, prostitutes,
madams, drug dealers, and local toughs, each of whose stories Hong recounts in detail, as
Barmé describes:
They’re bored and frustrated, creating their own diversions. They don’t give a damn whether normal people sympathize with them or view them with distaste. They do nothing, and treat those who go about their business earnestly with ridicule and derision. In practical terms they are the ‘dregs’ (zhazi) rejected by society; their actions show them to be blatantly out of step with or in oppositions to the moral order and the moral precepts of the society. Their psychological makeup determines that they are completely incompatible with the environment, and then when the rest of us look down upon them with disgust and displeasure they respond with an even more dismissive attitude.9
Whether in Shenzhen or Shanghai, Hong and the people that she spends time with have
all been pulled into their current lifestyles by a desire for fame and fortune, as well as a
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general lack of interest in “playing by society’s rules.” Many of Hong’s prostitute friends
had been brought into this lifestyle because of a man. Even Hong herself comments on
the kind of life she has chosen for herself:
In this meaningless youth of mine, I was the victim and the assassin; I felt ashamed and unworthy, which was why I couldn’t just end this weird trip I was on right then and there. In the end, maybe I forced myself to go on living, but wasn’t the fear of death that saved me; it was my own self-loathing.10
Much like the description that Barmé offers of liumang youth, Mian Mian too describes
Hong as being a directionless, “self-loathing” young woman, by turns both defiant and
rebellious as well as aimless and barely managing to survive. At first, Hong deals with
her conflicted feelings of self with drugs and by performing on stage, losing herself in the
music that she performs. Later, after she has lost her voice and finally given up her drug
habit, it is writing which provides an outlet for her to express her rebellious feelings, as
well as work out her own identity. Moreover, as Hong’s writing becomes more and more
intertwined with her self-identity, it becomes increasingly important for her to make that
identity visible, which is what makes her liumang fiction fundamentally different from
the privacy fiction of the female avant-garde writers.
Like the works of the avant-garde women writers, Candy is not an autobiography
in the strictest sense. Rather, Mian Mian both claims and disavows the self that she
writes about in the pages of her novel:
I am in a ditch where water has collected after the rain, my name is Mian Mian, and this story is not the story of my life. My life story will have to wait until I can write nakedly. That’s my dream….Right now the real story has everything to do with my writing, and nothing to do with my readers….this remembered world is mine, I possess it, and it is everything to me.11
Written in the last pages of the novel, after several long sections of text which are written
in the first person and represent both Hong’s and Saining’s internal monologues, Mian
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Mian’s claim here reads very much like Lin Bai’s claim in “True-Hearted Lovers Cannot
Separate” that, “[T[hat woman isn’t me.”12 Rather, Hong’s life in Candy parallels Mian
Mian’s own to such a degree that it is more appropriate to read it as “semi-
autobiographical fiction,” as is much of the fiction of the body/beauty writers. For Mian
Mian, there is a strong connection between her writing and herself, much like that of the
female avant-garde writers; it is the means by which she narrates her self, as well as
creates a space for herself in her fiction:
What I really wanted to get out of writing was to arrive as some deeper understanding of things; but the only thing I knew for sure was that writing had, at least for the time being, made me into a hardworking woman.13
For the first time since the death of her classmate when they were sixteen, Hong feels that
she now has some direction in her life, direction that has been provided by her writing.
In trying to narrate herself Hong is forced to confront herself, to try to figure herself out.
This in turn has given her a purpose—to continue writing. And much like the female
avant-garde writers also express the need to understand themselves through their writing,
Hong’s physical self becomes the foundation for her self-narration, as she says, “I believe
in my body. More than anything else, I believe in my body, and my body conceals
limitless truths. I need to live in my emotions.”14 Like Xu Kun and Mao Zhen work out
their painful experiences with love in their writing, and Lin Bai’s Duomi prefers to write
in the nude in order to be closer to her poetry, so too does Hong draw inspiration form
her own physical self, as well as her life experiences:
I am someone who sees herself as a problem. For me, writing is a method of transforming corruption and decay into something wonderful and miraculous. I used to be the sort of person who was always on the lookout for excitement and novelty, but now I’ve somehow come to sense that if any marvels are going to appear in my life, they will undoubtedly spring from the act of writing. Actually,
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the prospect of marvels doesn’t really excite me anymore. I feel that writing is the only thing that has meaning for me.15
While she does not specifically refer to herself as a liumang youth, Hong does describe
herself in those terms. She “sees herself as a problem,” someone who has, “always been
on the lookout for excitement and novelty.” She also recognizes that the aimless liumang
life she led in Shenzhen took her down a dark path, and that writing is the means by
which she has recovered from that path, the means by which she is able to make
something good come out of her past. This is an important point because it lays the
foundation for understanding how Mian Mian’s fiction, and that of the body/beauty
writers like her, is different from the fiction of the avant-garde writers. While both
groups use writing as a means to narrate themselves, and create a space of self in their
fiction, for the avant-garde writers that space is also a space of resistance. For Mian
Mian, on the other hand, the space of self that she creates in her fiction is one of
redemption, a place which enables her to rejoin society rather than hold it at a distance, as
the female avant-garde writers do.
The connection between her writing and herself does not stop at redemption for
Mian Mian. It is also the means by which she is finally able to gain public recognition, as
Hong points out:
Really I was writing simply to gain a clearer understanding of myself. I wrote for myself, for my good friends, and sometimes for men with whom I’d once been close. As I wrote, I became more ambitious, and I wanted lots of people to read what I wrote—I wanted the whole world to see what I’d written. After the writing was done, I wanted to become famous, but was there really anything that great about being famous? I’d already imagined what that would be like. I’d set myself on this path, the path of a writer, and only now did I realize that it wasn’t necessarily going to bring me peace.16
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Never able to make a name for herself as a singer or musician, Hong nevertheless has
always enjoyed being looked at, and her writing provides a new way for her gain the
attention that she enjoys. In fact the more she writes, the more she wants people to look
at what she’s written. And because of the connection that she feels between her writing
and herself, when the “whole world” looks at what she’s written, they are effectively
looking at her. This desire to be looked at is fundamentally different form the female
avant-garde writers project of literary privacy, and their desire to create a space in their
fiction where they can control how and how much of their bodies can be read by the
public.
Another fundamental difference between Mian Mian’s liumang body/beauty
writing and the privacy literature of the female avant-garde writers is in their descriptions
of sexual desire, and sexual behavior. The female avant-garde writers use alternative
forms of female sexuality in order to resist the socially constructed image of woman as
wife and mother. Instead, the uplifting aspects of qing are usually homosocially or
autoerotically expressed, while heterosexual relationships are portrayed as being
unfamiliar and harmful. Like Lin Bai’s Duomi, Hong’s first sexual experiences are
autoerotic, the result of her boredom and teenage angst:
Strange days overtook me, and I grew idle. I let myself go, feeling I had more time on my hands than I knew what to do with. Indolence made my voice increasingly gravelly. I started to explore my body, either in front of the mirror or at my desk. I had no desire to understand it-I only wanted to experience it.17
She first starts to explore her own sexuality as a kind of release after her friend commits
suicide. In experiencing her own body she is able to reassure herself of her own
existence; it has no greater meaning for Hong than proof that she is alive. Absent from
her description of this behavior is an discussion of her own pleasure. In fact, Hong does
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not seem to derive much pleasure from traditional sex either, other than reassurance. For
example when she loses her virginity to Saining, for her point of view the experience
borders on rape—she feels nothing but fear, pain, and self-loathing afterwards, “The face
I saw in the crooked mirror was an ugly face. Never in my life had I felt so disgusted
with myself. And ever since, I have carried the shame of that moment in my body.”18
Throughout her relationship with Saining, and in her other relationships with men, what
she gets most from her sexual encounters with them is the knowledge that she is
desirable. The initial sense of self-loathing that marks her sexual encounters with Saining
bleeds into her other relationships with men; it even takes nearly ten years for when she
loses her virginity to when she is almost thirty years old for Hong to have her first
orgasm. And while she does describe getting physical gratification from her heterosexual
relationships, it is always colored by a hint of shame. As such, it is neither a means to an
end, as will be discussed below with Wei Hui, nor is it something to be resisted, as it is
for the female avant-garde writers. Rather, it is just one more aspect of Hong’s life which
is representative of her liumang lifestyle.
Furthermore, rather than resist heterosexual sex and the negative feelings that it
leaves behind, as some of the characters the female avant-garde writers do, Hong actually
seeks out these feelings:
It seems to me that love was invented by men. I used to think of myself as a woman who wouldn’t have been ashamed to die for a man, and I saw it as a sign of my own courage and greatness. Inhabiting that man’s world turned me into a weak woman for a long time. I was so weak, so desperate for love, and, deeply aware of my own pathos, I developed a knack for displaying my self-absorption and self-pity. That was my closed, intense inner world, and I thought that it was beautiful.19
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While sex with Saining (and her other lovers) may not be filled with the uplifting aspects
of qing that the female avant-garde writers seek out in their relationships with women or
in their autoerotic behavior, it is also not something which Hong feels she needs to avoid
or resist, but rather a way for her to be sure of her own body and her own existence:
I wanted to be controlled by him because I didn’t know it could be otherwise, and there was something absolute and pure about our need to obey our emotions, and this gave me certainty. I reveled in the shameful feelings our couplings gave me, as if this was what I was living for.20
Rather than choose to live alone, as both Xu Kun’s Mao Zhen and Hai Nan’s Su Xiu do,
or downplaying the importance of her marriage, as Lin Bai’s Lin Duomi does, Hong
enjoys the negative feelings that she associates with her relationship with Saining and her
sexual relationships with men in general. They become a source of reassurance for her
emotionally, and a source of inspiration for her writing. As such, while there may be
some aspects of overlap, Mian Mian’s depictions of Hong’s sexual behavior are just one
more point of difference between her liumang body/beauty writing, and then privacy
writing of the female avant-garde writers.
Wei Hui’s Shanghai Baby and Linglei Culture
Like Mian Mian’s Candy, Shanghai Baby also shares certain aspects in common
with the female avant-garde writers, and like Candy, also shows the same outward-
turning focus towards fame and wealth that is missing from the self-referential privacy
fiction of the female avant-garde writers. Whereas Mian Mian writes about herself as a
member of what I describe above as an new urban liumang subculture, Wei Hui openly
and refers to herself as linglei, literally “another kind,” as Zhong Xueping describes:
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In Shanghai Baby, the author constructs the fantasy world of the young urbanites known as linglei, or ‘other-kind’, individuals who live and write like Ni Ke, the protagonist and, by implication, Wei Hui, the author. Her voice is explicitly sexual and her cultural references are almost exclusively Western, a combination that seemed to draw the attention of various forces, be they the state the market, ‘international opinion’, Western China scholars and feminists or readers, critics, writers and scholars in China.21
As one of the new various Western-influenced subcultures to emerge after the events of
June 4, 1989, linglei is a slightly younger social phenomenon than liumang discussed
above. As David Drissel explains in his study of post-June Fourth Tiananmen
subcultures:
In the literary realm, self-described linglei wenxue (“alternative literature”) writers such as Wei Hui (Shanghai Baby) and Chen Sue (Beijing Doll) have championed an ostensibly de-politicized form of subcultural prose. Known popularly as “babe writers,” such young women have made a major social impact on Chinese popular culture and provoked intense controversy with their incredibly frank novels.22
The distinction between the self-referential fiction of the female avant-garde writers and
the highly commercialized and sexualized novels of the body/beauty writers boils down
to their different goals in writing. Where the avant-garde women writers seek to create a
private literary space for themselves in their fiction, linglei writers like Wei Hui and
Chen Sue seek public recognition and financial gain. As such, it is in understanding the
linglei culture of 1990s Shanghai that it is possible to understand the differences between
Wei Hui’s particular kind of “body” writing as a representative work of the genre, and the
works of the female avant-garde writers.
In Shanghai Baby, Wei Hui tells the story of Nikki (Ni Ke), who her friends call
Coco, after Coco Chanel. This is the first thing that we learn about Nikki—that she
admires and models herself after this French fashion mogul, and desires a similar kind of
fame, as Nikki says:
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Every morning when I open my eyes I wonder what I can do to make myself famous. It’s become my ambition, almost like my raison d’être, to burst upon the city like fireworks….Anyway, I’m just twenty-five, and a year ago I published a collection of short stories that didn’t make any money but got me attention.23
From the very first moment the reader meets Nikki, Wei Hui’s alter-ego, she presents
herself as a driven women who is looking for fame and fortune, and her writing is a
means to that end. As Nikki provides more and more information about herself we learn
that she grew up in a relatively well-off family, and attended Fudan University. She
works part-time at the Green Stalk Café in the beginning of the novel, which is where she
meets her shy and artistic boyfriend Tiantian. Nikki also has a cousin who is slightly
older than she, whose name is Zhu Sha, and who is the very epitome of modern feminine
grace. Nikki often compares herself to Zhu Sha, feeling that she can’t live up to that high
standard of beauty and quiet capability that Zhu Sha embodies. Tiantian convinces Nikki
to give up her job at the Green Stalk Café, and start working on her novel. Nikki is easily
convinced, and begins work right away. Originally her intention is to write a grand
historical love story, however as things begin to happen to Nikki, the heroine of her novel
begins to mirror her own life more and more. In this sense, much like the “self-begetting
novels” of the female avant-garde writers, we can see how at a certain level Shanghai
Baby also functions as a self-referential work of metafiction: aspects of Wei Hui are
mirrored in Nikki, and likewise aspects of Nikki are mirrored in her own novel’s
heroine.24 Similarly, this is also the case in Nikki’s first published work, which is also
the title of Wei Hui’s first published work, The Shriek of the Butterfly:
Everyone was whispering about this risqué book, and rumor had it that I was a bisexual with a predilection for violence. Students were caught stealing my book from bookstores. I got letters, with erotic photos enclosed, from men via my editor, wanting to know what my relationship was with the heroine of the book.25
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For both Wei Hui and Nikki, their self-referential fiction becomes the means by which
they become visible in the public eye; in their narration they expose themselves in order
to gain notoriety. This is one key difference between the body/beauty writers and the
female avant-garde writers: one group is focused on public recognition, while the other is
concerned with the creation of a private space. This is a point I will return to below.
During the course of her relationship with Tiantian, Nikki meets a German man
named Mark, and the two begin a clandestine sexual affair. Mark is married and Nikki is
wholeheartedly in love with Tiantian, although Tiantian is impotent and unable to satisfy
her sexually. So when Nikki meets Mark and begins sleeping with him, it seems like an
ideal solution to her predicament. However, Mark’s sexual desire and the pleasure that
he gives her physically begins to threaten Nikki’s relationship with Tiantian, as well as
her own sense of self. One night, when they have met in a club, he drags her into the
bathroom to have sex. During the act she is consumed by passion, which quite quickly
gives way to a feeling of loss:
I began to cry. This was all so inexplicable. I was increasingly losing my self-confidence and suddenly felt even cheaper than the prostitutes dancing downstairs. At least they had professionalism and a certain coolness, while I was awkward and horribly torn between two personalities. I couldn’t stand the face I saw reflected in the grimy mirror. Something in my body had been lost, leaving a gaping hole.26
Nikki’s description here of both the psychological and physical effect of this intense
heterosexual encounter are very similar to Mian Mian’s descriptions in Candy discussed
above. For both women, having sex with their respective male partners threatens to
overwhelm their own identities, and leaves them feeling emotionally vulnerable and
somewhat self-loathing. In addition, this kind of “violent” heterosexual sex also leaves
them with a physical sensation of loss, that is, that something has been taken from their
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bodies. While not all heterosexual sex is portrayed as threatening as dangerous as
Nikki’s relationship with Mark or Hong’s relationship with Saining, this is one aspect of
both Shanghai Baby and Candy that is similar to the female avant-garde writers—the
portrayal of heterosexual relationships as damaging to female selfhood.
While Nikki feels tremendous guilt for cheating on Tiantian, and while she tires
of being overwhelmed my Mark’s sheer masculinity, she also finds herself unable to stop
seeing him. Tiantian leaves to go to Hainan for a while and relax while Nikki works on
her novel. She consoles herself by reminding herself that she will not let Mark or any
other man get in the way of her pursuit of fame and fortune. She even goes so far as to
tell herself, “Women whose lives are littered with ex-lovers are a dime a dozen; when
they pass thirty, their faces reveal their lack of inhibitions. I sometimes wish men would
treat me as a writer and not as a woman, I thought to myself disingenuously.”27 This is a
question to which Nikki returns time and time again: whether she wants to be seen as a
woman or as a writer, and a point to which I will return to later.
As Nikki’s communication with Tiantian becomes more sporadic, she eventually
goes to Hainan to look for him and discovers that he has become addicted to morphine.
She convinces him to come back to Shanghai with her and go to rehab. When Tiantian
gets out of rehab, everything is better between them for a while. In the meantime, Nikki
has also more or less finished her novel and is now working with her publisher to
promote it. At this point, Mark learns that he is being transferred back to Germany and
so Nikki goes to spend a few days with him before he leaves; when she finally returns to
the apartment where she lives with Tiantian she finds him gone. Eventually, Nikki tracks
Tiantian down at a friend’s house, where he has gone after finding out that Nikki had
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been cheating on him. Shortly afterwards he beings using drugs again. In the end, two
days after Mark returns to Germany, Tiantian overdoses and dies. Distraught, and
finishing the last few pages of her novel, Nikki finds herself trying to figure out who she
really is, now that she has lost both the man she loves and the man she desires, and the
novel ends with this question, as Zhong summarizes, “Ni Ke’s voice can be recognized as
a late twentieth-century echo of Sophia’s as yet another cultural challenge from a woman
writer confronting the public with a woman’s sexual desire and conflicted feelings about
that desire.”28 Here Zhong is referring to Ding Ling’s “Miss Sophia’s Diary,” and
Sophia’s own situation stuck between Ling Jishi and Weidi. And ultimately, it is in
understanding Nikki’s desire to understand herself in the face of her relationships with
these two men that many of the differences between Shanghai Baby and the works of the
female avant-garde writers become clear.
Much like the female avant-garde writers, Nikki’s most meaningful heterosexual
relationship is far from ideal. As mentioned previously, Nikki meets Tiantian at the café
she works at, and quite quickly falls in love with his gentle spirit and artistic soul.
However, from the start of their relationship he is unable to pleasure her physically, and
she frequently describes alternately both begging him to try to satisfy her physical desire
and masturbating because he is unable to perform. However, unlike the female avant-
garde writers, it is not that heterosexual relationships in general for Nikki are damaging,
but rather that there is not a necessary connection between love and sex. Like the female
avant-garde writers, Nikki has sworn off conventional marriage and children, at least
while she is young and fashionable; unlike the avant-garde women writers Nikki’s lack of
interest in these normative social roles has to do with her desire to use her youth and
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beauty to make a name for herself rather than be tied to a husband and a home. Similarly,
heterosexual relationships become one means for Nikki to take control of her future,
particularly given the connection that is made between Nikki the author and the
characters in her books. Because of her appearance, Nikki is able to attract readers and
promote both herself and her writing. Whereas the female avant-garde writers resist
heteronormative relationships in order to create their space of literary privacy, linglei
writers Like Wei Hui play use sex and sexuality as a tool to gain public appeal.
Nikki also engages in some homoerotic behavior at one point in the novel,
although it is brief. At a dinner party with Mark and some of his friends, Nikki meets a
lesbian named Shamir. For her part, Shamir is enchanted by Nikki’s intelligence and
beauty, while Nikki is aroused by Shamir’s praise and desire:
Thanks to those words of appreciation, before we parted we stood at the entrance to Park 97, kissing intimately in the shadow of the trees. Her moist, inviting lips attracted me like an exotic flower, and I felt a sudden carnal pleasure as our tongues intertwined smoothly and perilously, like silk. I can’t explain why I overstepped the bounds of ambiguity with this unfamiliar woman—from chatting to kissing, from a good-bye kiss to a passionate one.29
Rather than providing an uplifting outlet, as do the various expressions or suggestions of
female-female homoerotic desire for the female avant-garde writers, Nikki gets pleasure
from being looked at and desired, be it by a man or by a woman. And in this case, it is
not just Shamir’s desire which arouses Nikki, but her words of praise for Nikki’s beauty
and ability—much like her desire for fame and public recognition, Nikki’s ego is also the
key to her sexual desire. And it is this connection between her ego, her desire, and her
writing which makes up most of the story of Shanghai Baby.
Wei Hui emphasizes the connection between not just sex but also Nikki’s own
physical body and writing throughout Shanghai Baby. Much like Lin Bai’s Lin Duomi,
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Nikki feels a connection between herself and her writing, and often reproduces in her
“real life” what her characters are experiencing in her writing. At one point, as she
becomes more and more absorbed by her novel, Nikki writes:
I was hypnotized by my novel. To convey one torrid scene as authentically as possible, I tried writing naked. Many people believe that there’s a connection between the body and the mind….I certainly believe there’s a secret connection between writing and the body. When my body shape is relatively full, every sentence I write is pithy and poignant, whereas when I’m thinner, my writing is full of overlong sentences like dense clumps of silky-soft seaweed.30
This is the point at which works like Shanghai Baby is most similar to the works of the
female avant-garde writers. All of these women emphasize the connections between
writing and their own physical bodies, and reference the physicality of the process of
writing in their fiction. It would be easy to say that this is simply the result of these
authors’ engagement with contemporary Chinese feminism, à la Li Xiaojiang and Dai
Jinhua, however I suspect that the situation is far more complex. Certainly it is a
question which deserves further investigation in the future.
Moreover, Wei Hui does not simply emphasize the connection between writing
and physicality in Shanghai Baby, but also the connection between her writing and the
narration of self. Unlike the female avant-garde writers, Nikki’s persona shifts depending
on whose company she is in, depending on how she wants or needs to present herself to
get what she needs or reach her goals. Large sections of Shanghai Baby are taken up
with Nikki trying to decide what to wear in order to make the right kind of impression—
does she want to present herself as a quiet, intellectual writer, or a sexy, cosmopolitan
woman? As noted before, this is the biggest question to which Nikki, and by extension
Wei Hui, returns again and again. And it is in her writing that Nikki ultimately finds a
way to show a side of herself beyond the carefully crafted veneer:
202
I gave up embellishment and lies. I intended to put a completely genuine version of my life before the public’s eye. This didn’t require too much courage, just obedience to that mysterious force. As long as it felt good, that was enough; I didn’t have to play naïve or cool. This is how I discovered my real self and overcame my terror or loneliness, poverty, death, and all other potential disasters.31
Like the female avant-garde writers, Nikki finds in her writing a place where she
can drop all of her pretenses and portray her more “genuine” self. However, because of
Nikki’s previous and repeated confessions that she became a writer to gain fame and
fortune, as well as her frequent discussions of how to present herself, the reader cannot
completely trust that the self that Nikki discusses narrating in the pages of her novel (the
self that we can assume that Wei Hui is narrating through Nikki) is her “genuine” self and
not another façade designed to increase Nikki’s (and Wei Hui’s) public visibility. Nikki
herself draws the reader’s attention to this point while she is writing her novel. While she
has previously expressed some frustration with the fact that particularly her male readers
are unable to effectively separate her as an author from the characters that she writes
about, as discussed above in regard to Shriek of the Butterfly, she also feels a certain
amount of satisfaction that she has been able to inspire these kinds of reactions in her
readers, and knows that this will only add to her fame. However, in writing her new
novel, as more and more of her own life creeps into the pages of her writing Nikki starts
to feel certain concerns:
The novel had brought me a new worry. I didn’t know how to disguise myself effectively to my readers. In other words, I didn’t want to mix my novel up with my real life, and to be honest, I was even more worried that as the plot developed, it could have an impact on my future.32
Ultimately, since the narration of a “genuine” self is neither Nikki, nor Wei Hui’s, goal
this additional layer of uncertainly is beside the point, however, it also is another point of
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difference between Wei Hui’s linglei literature and the self-referential privacy literature
of the female avant-garde writers.
Through Nikki, Wei Hui also discusses feminism, and like the female avant-garde
writers, she expresses a certain amount of reluctance to label herself as a feminist. For
example, one night Nikki is having a conversation with one of her friends, an older
woman named Madonna. They are discussing Madonna’s experiences as a young
woman, and the way that she became a madam. Madonna remarks that she would like to
write a book one day, in order to help women learn how to take advantage of men. Nikki
responds by saying:
“When you get down to it, the social system still devalues the needs of women and doesn’t support their efforts to recognize their self-worth,” I said. “Girls who are street-smart are put down as crude, and those who are gentler are treated like emptyheaded flower vessels.”…I wouldn’t set myself up as a women’s lib warrior, but what she said rang true, and it helped me discover the hidden place in her mind that housed her deeper and more mature thoughts.33
In fact, neither Nikki nor Madonna considers themselves as feminists. Yet, much like the
female avant-garde writers, they are very much aware of the inequalities that face women
in contemporary society. However, unlike the female avant-garde writers, while Nikki
and Madonna both express a desire to use this inequality to their advantage—they are
both attractive, fashionable, and financially well-off, which gives them the means to
exploit these inequalities. In Madonna’s case, she was able to parlay her beauty into a
profitable business as the madam of a brothel for wealthy men; for Nikki, she is able to
use her beauty as a way to market herself and her writing in order to become famous. For
both women, although they decry the “male gaze” and the effects that it has on women,
they also know exactly how to manipulate that gaze for their own gain. This desire to
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exploit patriarchal culture rather than resist it, as the female avant-garde writers do, is yet
another way in which the body/beauty writers differ from the female avant-garde writers.
Rather, it is in Nikki’s internal thoughts that she sounds the most similar to the
female avant-garde writers. At one point, while she is still immersed in writing her
novel, she goes with Madonna to swim in the pool at a hotel. Madonna convinces her
that being out and being seen will help Nikki feel better. However, after they arrive at
the pool, Nikki finds herself oddly put off by the experience of being looked at:
Usually the expressions of strangers looking at me half naked gave me an instinctive sense of satisfaction, but as soon as I thought of myself as a dessert exposing myself in broad daylight, I became uncontrollably angry. Feminism reared it head. What was it that made me seem so like an empty-headed Barbie doll? Those men probably couldn’t guess I was a novelist who’d just shut herself in a room for seven days and seven nights, and they probably couldn’t care less either. When one notices an unknown woman, one needs only to check out her three key measurements; one needn’t consider what she’s got upstairs any more than one might consider the number of steps up to the White House.34
It is in these more personal moments, when Nikki is thinking to herself rather than when
she is putting on a particular persona, that Wei Hui creates for Nikki a private space
where no one else can enter. And in this private space, Nikki has similar reactions to
patriarchal culture and the male gaze as the female avant-garde writers. Moreover, like
the protagonists in the self-referential fiction of the female avant-garde writers, only
Nikki has access to these thoughts: while on the outside she has several difference public
faces that she presents, depending on with whom she is interacting; her interior
monologue, rather, becomes a place where she is able to freely express herself and her
thoughts, a space that belongs only to her. Unlike the female avant-garde writers,
however, Wei Hui only juxtaposes these two different sides of Nikki in a few key places.
Her goal is not to create a private space for self-reflection in the character of Nikki, but
205
rather to get noticed in the public eye. In order to understand Wei Hui and Nikki’s desire
for public recognition, it is useful to look at linglei culture, and what it means when Wei
Hui narrates Nikki as a member of that subculture.
At several points throughout Shanghai Baby, Nikki describes herself and her
friends as linglei. Largely appearing on the cultural scene in the 1990s and after, there is
much about linglei that is influenced by the increasing commercialization seen in the 90s
and after. The term literally means, “another kind,” and refers to:
[E]lements such as being ‘alternative', ‘funky', ‘provocative', etc. However, unlike many alternative youth movements which exist elsewhere, the linglei in China seldom have any political agenda. Although it can be assumed that the limited freedom of speech in China prevents such agendas, when looking carefully at the linglei phenomenon and its roots, it is evident the most linglei only want two thing: To express themselves out in the open and to resist the ‘mainstream'. It is not a movement that happens to be a minority and hence an ‘alternative', but rather a movement which is produced as a counter response to the Chinese mainstream.35
It is clear from this definition how in describing Nikki and her friends as linglei in
Shanghai Baby, that Wei Hui is setting herself apart from the female avant-garde writers.
While I have discussed in previous chapters how the female avant-garde writers are not
explicitly political in their attempts to create a space of si-privacy in their fiction, this act
of resistance and reappropriation is at the very least motivated by their dissatisfaction
with the public representation of women in society. And the roots of this dissatisfaction
are politically-motivated. That is to say, and as it has been the purpose of this study to
show, while it is too much to call the self-referential fiction of the avant-garde women
writers overtly political (and therefore publicly-oriented), the act of reappropriation is in
itself an inherently political one. However, the linglei subculture has from the very
beginning been motivated by a desire for public recognition and financial success. In his
206
article, Drissel discusses the evolution of the term linglei alongside the commercialization
of culture. He notes:
Originally the term was clearly pejorative; often associated with disreputable hooligans, hoodlums, loafers, and other riffraff categorized as liumang. Labeled as “the other species,” linglei people were almost uniformly viewed with disdain and disrespect. But within the past decade or so, a growing number of subcultural entrepreneurs have proudly admitted to being linglei, thereby seeking to redefine the term as an “alternative lifestyle” that is hip and cool.36
Thus as Drissel notes, while at one point there may have been some overlap between the
rebellious and indolent liumang described by Wang Shuo in the 1980s discussed above,
as increasing commercialization took over cultural production in the 1990s a different
subculture developed whose primary motivation was gaining public recognition. Nikki
herself comments on this connection between her linglei friends and the desire to be seen:
The circuit she meant is composed of artists, real and phony, foreigners, vagabonds, greater and lesser performers, private entrepreneurs of industries that are currently fashionable, true and fake linglei, and Generation X types. Members of this circle move in and out of the public eye, now visible, then hidden, but ultimately dominating most of the city’s trend-setting scene.37
The key point of overlap amongst all her friends is that they are all so-called “trend-
setters.” In order to set a trend, be it a fashion or art etc., one must be visible to a lot of
people, and must make their fashion or art or cultural production accessible to those
people. This visibility and accessibility epitomizes the differences between Wei Hui’s
Shanghai Baby, and linglei body/beauty writing in general, and the avant-garde women
writer’s works of literary privacy.
In closing, I would like to reiterate the clearest distinction between body/beauty
writing, as represented by works like Mian Mian’s Candy and Wei Hui’s Shanghai Baby,
a distinction which boils down to a difference in orientation. While the body/beauty
writers are often read in a similar fashion to the female avant-garde writers, or praised for
207
their graphic depictions of female sexuality as an expression of the extent of women’s
liberation. Indeed, both groups of writers use similar elements in their fiction, combining
self-referential elements with depictions of female sexuality and discussions of self-
narration. However, as Schaffer and Son point out, while reading the body/beauty writers
as taking control of their own sexuality, at the same time, “They extend the reach of a
sexualized woman-centered culture, shamelessly seeking notoriety through a self-style
exploitation of themselves through the commodification of their bodies.”38 Influenced
heavily by the increasing commercialization of the 1990s, the body/beauty writers write
about their bodies and themselves in order to be seen—to gain public recognition and
financial gain. In comparison, and as this study has shown, it is in the way the female
avant-garde writers reappropriate the traditionally negative concept of si and use it as a
tool to resist the patriarchal culture and heteronormative social roles by creating for
themselves a space of literary privacy in their fiction.
Notes 1 If Duomi derives any sexual pleasure from her husband she never mentions it. 2 Schaffer and Song, 24. 3 Ibid. 4 Zhong Xueping, “Who Is a Feminist? Understanding the Ambivalence towards Shanghai Baby, ‘Body Writing’ and Feminism in Post-Women’s Liberation China.” Gender and History 18 no. 3 (November 2006), 636. 5 Shaffer and Song, 25. 6 Gary Xu and Susan Feiner, “Meinü jingji/ China’s Beauty Economy: Buying Looks, Shifting Value and Changing Place,” Feminist Economics 13 no. 3-4 (July/October 2007), 308.
208
7 Jonathan Napack, “Banned in Beijing: A Rebel Writer’s Message,” International Herald Tribune, February 8, 2001. Reprinted in Mian Mian, Candy with permission. 8 Geremie Barmé, “Wang Shuo and Liumang (‘Hooligan’) Culture,” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 28 (July 1992), 28-29. 9 Barmé, 33; quoting from Yan Jingming, “Wanzhu yu dushide chongtu- lun Wang Shuo xiaoshuode jiazhi xuanze; [The wanzhu and the City Clash—On Value Choices in Wang Shuo’s Fiction], Wenxue pinglun [Literary Criticism], no. 6, 1989, 87. 10 Mian Mian, Candy: A Novel, Andrea Lingenfelter tr., (New York: Little Brown and Co., 2003), 142. 11 Mian Mian, 269. 12 Lin Bai, “True-Hearted Lovers Cannot Separate,” in The Collected Writings of Lin Bai, 137. 13 Mian Mian, 149. 14 Mian Mian, 162. 15 Mian Mian, 171. 16 Mian Mian, 184. 17 Mian Mian, 8. 18 Mian Mian, 17. 19 Mian Mian, 142. 20 Mian Mian, 41. 21 Zhong, 643. 22 David Drissel, “Reinventing Rebellion: Alternative Youth Subcultures in Post-Tiananmen China,” The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences 3 no.10, 50. 23 Wei Hui, Shanghai Baby, Bruce Humes, tr., (New York: Pocket Books, 2001), 1. 24 In addition to The Shriek of the Butterfly, Nikki also attended the same university as Wei Hui (Fudan University) and they both graduated in the same year, 1995. Nikki shares enough of these superficial details in common with Wei Hui that she is often read as Wei Hui, although Shanghai Baby is not typically read as an autobiography, but rather semi-autobiographical fiction. 25 Wei Hui, 68.
209
26 Wei Hui, 74. 27 Wei Hui, 109, emphasis mine. 28 Zhong, 642. 29 Wei Hui, 210. 30 Wei Hui, 167-168. 31 Wei Hui, 167. 32 Wei Hui, 92. 33 Wei Hui, 121. 34 Wei Hui, 173. 35 “’Linglei:’ The Possibility to Oppose the Mainstream,” last checked May 2012, http://thinkingchinese.com/linglei 36 Drissel, 48. 37 Wei Hui, 39. 38 Schaffer and Song, 25.
210
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